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  Photo courtesty of Hornocker Wildlife Institute. |
"We're losing her." The dying signal from No. 78’s radio collar confirms Tracy Taylor’s low-toned murmur. No matter what direction she turns the telemetry antenna, the electronic path of the cougar she and fellow WSU student Jeff Olmstead have been tracking threatens to disappear in static. High in the northeast Oregon mountains, after coaxing Taylor and Olmstead off their snowmobiles and into knee-deep snow for a quarter mile, the cat known for getting dogs to chase their own trails succeeds in shaking off her pursuers. And she has weather in her favor. A snowstorm earlier in the week dumped an extra foot of snow in the mountains, virtually eradicating the trails Taylor and Olmstead made and ensuring a stuck snowmobile for every 1,000 feet of trailblazing. In a morning and afternoon of stopping and starting, digging out and trudging, the students have pinpointed a possible compass reading of No. 78 based on her strongest telemetry signal. They will come back tomorrow to test that. So ends day 13 in a straight 25-day sequence Taylor and Olmstead are putting in for WSU graduate student Cathy Nowak. Nowak is tracking eight radio-collared female cougars in the Catherine Creek Wildlife Management Unit near Union, Oregon, to study their feeding habits. She and the students look for cougar kills and scat to determine how many deer and elk the cats eat so wildlife managers can make the best decisions based on the predators’ needs. Predation in cougars has not been studied as much as in wolves, says Nowak. In fact, Nowak’s is the only cougar project in northeast Oregon and the only cougar project taking place at WSU. Her team closely monitors the movements of the female cats for 25 days, or until one cougar has made four kills. The idea is to get as close to the cat as possible without scaring her. A cougar typically stays in the vicinity of its kill until she finishes eating it, usually seven days, then moves to another part of her territory to hunt again. When the cougar has moved, Nowak and her assistants try to find the kill and, once found, attempt to identify the prey species, age, sex, and condition before death. Scat samples are sent back to Pullman for analysis to determine the animal species the cats eat and how much they eat small prey, or “in-between-snacks,” as Nowak quips. Nowak has documented 64 kills over a year-and-a-half of research, with no domestic animals reported. This is an important finding, she says—cougars are disliked by ranchers because of the perception that they hunt livestock. What they do hunt is mule deer, primarily fawns, and if adults, mostly does. They also hunt elk; but the proportion among Nowak’s documented kills is 43 deer to 21 elk. In addition, cougars are known to eat coyotes, which do prey on livestock. by Nella Letizia |
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