Good proactive article on mountain lions
Colorado
Great front page article in this morning's Coloradoan on lions, lion hunting, what will happen if it is banned. Seems like the CPW is being proactive for once.
Nice job Ty, and the writer for examining the issue in it's entirety.
Just sent author and Ty an email on the interview being very excellent using hunting as a game management tool. Just need to have the article printed on the front page of the Denver Post and Boulder-- and send USHS a copy. Paul
Great article and very interesting. I have only seen two lions in my entire life of 60 years in the woods. I'm sure i have been watch many times especially in deer country of Northwest Colorado. I was intrude with stat 3.8 lions per 38.9 square miles.
Do the math between 4 and 5 thousand one deer or similar animal per week that is a whopping 234,000 that is a lot of animals and they ain't drawing a tag or paying a fee...but wait they are enhancing our our door experience...like go elk says...he has seen two in all that time I have seen zero in 45 years in the woods...I feel like they are the biggest killers of hard won sheep herds...and the impact on deer goes with out saying
"but wait they are enhancing our our door experience"
Absolutely they are! I've seen a few, it's always a pleasure...
Got one runnin around a few miles southeast of me now. 5 miles east of Wellington. Sure he'll get himself in trouble before long.
Seems like I see a lot of lions, but I tend to spend a lot of time in both the high and low country with top-end glass looking for deer and sheep. Have killed a few here and there and hope that it made at least a tiny difference to reduce their impacts.
The most was when I saw 4 different lions at the same time glassing from a spot in Arizona two years ago. The deer were really pulled into a limited area due to the drought conditions and very little water available. The lions were obviously taking advantage of the situation. 4 lions x 52 deer a year = 208 deer. The deer numbers were definitely lower than expected and we found at least 10 carcasses while hiking around. Talk about an excessive impact to the deer herd in that area! They were certainly working hard to exceed their quota! Watched two of them stalking and one kill a deer while I was watching.
5000 lions x 52 deer/year = 260,000 dead deer in Colorado.
How fast could we get our deer numbers in Colorado back up without all that year-round, no-boundary killing?
How fast could our deer herds recover if there was a concentrated effort to remove lions and other predators in areas that suffered winter kill?
Interesting how much has changed in Colorado in such a very short time. I still remember when our hunter dollars were used to fund improvements to our big game herds by employing government trappers to kill predators like lions, bears, coyotes and wolves year round... Seem to remember a lot more deer back then as well!
Lions kill about 1/2 the entire deer population in Colorado every year. More than 1/2 in the areas lions are common. Luckily deer make more each year but trying to get mule deer populations to bounce back with a top predator killing hundreds of thousands every year isn't easy.
That’s not even taking into account the take by bears and coyotes. It’s a wonder we have any deer at all!
I guess i have to eat crow for saying oil and gas for decline of Mule deer after reading this.
