Mountain Lion Tranquilized, Rescued From Aqueduct Near Santa Cruz

A young male mountain lion tranquilized and rescued after it was trapped for hours in an aqueduct near downtown Santa Cruz is being released into the wild today, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman said.

The cat was first seen around 7 a.m. Later in the morning, it became trapped in the Branciforte Creek aqueduct near Water Street and May Avenue, police said.

Wildlife rescue crews from the University of California at Santa Cruz Puma Project were able to tranquilize the animal and it was transported to the Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center.

Staff from Moss Landing-based WildLife Emergency Services provided equipment for the rescue, including netting to block escape routes at the creek after they were alerted about the situation by Santa Cruz authorities around 8 a.m., group president Rebecca Dmytryk said.

A veterinarian from the Department of Fish and Wildlife was also at the scene, Mackey said.

A staff member from WildLife Emergency Services helped the veterinarian and police personnel move the tranquilized animal into a crate, Dmytryk said.

“We were all working for the good of the animal as well as the safety of the people,” Dmytryk said.

The mountain lion weighs about 100 pounds and is healthy and in “very good condition,” Mackey said.

Dmytryk said the young mountain lion was likely a few years old. The mountain lion was taken to the center around 1 p.m. and was set for released later Thursday—after the effects of the tranquilizer wore off—into an undisclosed area of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Mackey said.

Nothing like that position and the feeling that eyes are upon you to tweak the hair on the back of your neck.

.357, laser sights, and chest holster... with dog for early warning. I whisper about goodies once in a while to make sure she's paying attention.

Skeeter, aside from your dubious dodge (the City of Los Gatos has lots of hills and cats have been seen on the Bay side of El Camino Real), yours is the attitude of a townie, the sentiments proffered by the likes of Neil Wiley. They do not represent the attitude of people who work the land daily in the "wildlife corridors" the almighty State has set aside for you (including my land). Unfortunately, that urban attitude is doing real damage to the animals, the land, and the people who maintain it.

When Juan Crespi came north with the Portola expedition in 1769, his diary did not mention a single mountain lion. In fact, the only animals that the Indians had not nearly obliterated were grizzly bears and coyotes. The game was so sparse that the expedition was forced to slaughter their mules to stay alive. Whole regions were burned annually. Crespi recounted verdant fields of what he didn't know were crops.

Starr King recorded his impressions of the Bay Area in 1851:

"Here they have flowers in May, not shy, but rampant, as if nothing else had the right to be; flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile, flowers as the visible carpet of an immense mountain wall. You can gather them in clumps, a dozen varieties in one pull…. Imagine yourself looking across a hundred acres of wild meadow, stretching to the base of hills nearly two thousand feet high—the whole expanse swarming with little straw-colored wild sun-flowers, orange poppies, squadrons of purple beauties, battalions of pink…. This is what I saw on the road to San Mateo.” Those were the results of the habitat management regimen to which the entire botanical system had become accustomed for 10,000 years. We have changed it completely, and we don't know what we are doing.

We stopped the burning and eventually blew off hunting. Lands that were long dominated by annual forbs succeeded rapidly to grasslands, chaparral, and then forests. I have photos from the 1920s of our valley. It was a grassland with sparse oaks (that probably weren't there when the Indians had it because there is no stone in that area for making acorn flour). Today, other than a single hay field, it is all impacted forest. These stands are so dense that there is little to no groundcover. What little remains of the chaparral that once fed the birds is decadent.

Remember the Lexington fire?

In the presence of so many exotic plant species, each will expand its range after successive fires. Exotic brush will replace the native. Exotic grasses are so dominant that the largest remaining stand of undisturbed native grass in the Bay Area is less than an acre. A system that once consisted of fruit-bearing shrubs and leafy forbs will then be thistles, annual grasses, and hard seed coat weeds like broom (in other words, it will look like the dried-out disaster that is the Diablo Range). That process is putting a food desert in the middle of the Pacific flyway. The soils are so depleted of phosphorus and trace minerals that they cannot support the original vegetation.

Now I am NOT saying the land must be restored to its condition as managed by the "natives." We don't know how to do that anyway nor do we even know in detail how the system was once configured over a region as varietal as this. I am saying that we do need to restore breeding samples of those systems that once thrived here, else we will lose the genetic building blocks with which to optimize how we choose to make it work. If that happens, will we never learn what might have been made of it. If you are at all religious, it's that Genesis 1:28 thingy, you know, the first command G_d gave to humankind.

The damage can be reversed, but it is a lot of work with today's technologies. Our land had but 60 species of plants when we got here. It was dominated by broom, eucalyptus, acacia, and a dying oak madrone woodland. After 25 years of arduous labor, we have 371 plant species, five habitat types in various successional stages, and the purest native grasslands to be found anywhere in California. When the university professors come here, they are shocked, believing it could not be done.

I did it for your liberty, to take on an environmental movement that is destroying this State, economically, politically, and environmentally. The sentiment you expressed is aligned with that tyrannical disease perfectly, one that is destroying habitat while taking property value without compensation. It puts my life, my children, and my animals at needless risk, but it's worse than that.

When you and I were kids, our parents could tell us, "Go out and play." We could explore the land in relative safety, learning independence and self reliance. Today, we raise a generation to which we can no longer offer that blessing. No, we need to watch over them every minute. Now, just substitute parents with government and you see what that is doing.

Humans are the apex predator in every habitat system, worldwide. We are the only creature on earth with the prospective intelligence to increase the productivity of the land. We have abandoned that role, believing that somehow "Nature" is self-optimizing. It isn't. It has been habituated to human management for millennia and doesn't "know" what to do when we abandon that responsibility. We don't get a choice about maintaining land; it must be done, not just for fire, but for wildlife and our children. If you don't want periodic fires, that work must be done by people, whether by themselves or with animals. It is expensive, difficult, and intellectually demanding work. Unless it is done we will lose the foundations of the bacterial, fungal, and botanical symbioses that grow our food. They don't survive on ammonia. Even organic farming is relatively ignorant of the need for a pastoral rotation. It is only a matter of time. People usually don't prefer to be food or lose their animals just so that you can feel better about what is in reality a completely unbalanced wildlife system.

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