adventures

Although they've been trying unsuccessfully to capture a mountain lion since May, we caught two lions in the span of three days last week. Both were juvenile males about a year and a half old, and the biologists suspect they're brothers.


After blow-darting the lion with a sedative, the biologists remove him from the leg snare and move him to a tarp in a flat clearing.


For the hour or so the lion is out, the biologists take measurements, blood, tissue samples, and fit a GPS collar that will track the cat's movements every few hours.


The cats weighed about 90 and 115 pounds.


We caught the first cat on a hot day, and he got really worked up during the darting, so to cool him down, we poured alcohol and water all over him and fanned him with papers.


The head mountain lion biologist documented his teeth and paws.


Emmanuel demonstrated the length of the lion's tail so that interpreters will have a picture to show people who think they've seen a mountain lion but probably have seen either a deer or a bobcat.




Mountain lion's paws are assymmetrical, so you can tell right from left. In its tracks, look for three equal divisions on the rear of the pad.


The lion is given a reversal for its sedative when it starts to blink when its eyelid is touched.


We waited nearby for the cat to recover enough to walk away--the danger is that they'll fall asleep with their head on their new collar and suffocate. This photographer has been working on a documentary about the Santa Monica Mountain cougars for a year and these were the first live cats he's seen.