NOREEN: Mountain lion hunts, without any controversy

They shoot mountain lions, don't they?

By the end of March, hunters will kill 250-300 Colorado mountain lions, but the hunt won't trigger controversy because environmentalists and hunters have come to terms with each other.

Some people may not be aware there is a mountain lion season or that hundreds of the cats, mostly males, are taken each year. It's a business that brings in perhaps $750,000 to the outfitters who have the hounds trained for the hunts.

There is a golden triangle of sorts for mountain lions, with the points of the triangle being Colorado Springs, Buena Vista and Cañon City.

"It's been said that's the biggest concentration of lions," said Michael Seraphin of the Colorado Division of Wildlife.

Mountain lion hunting peaked in 2004, when 439 cats were killed. The number of licenses dropped off after pressure from the WildEarth Guardians, a Santa Fe-based group specializing in wildlife issues.

The group argued, and nobody could dispute it, that Colorado had no way of counting lions, so it might be killing too many of them.

Wendy Keefover-Ring, director of carnivore protection for the group, said the first small victory was to persuade the Colorado Wildlife Commission to pay for computer modeling "to deduce how many mountain lions they have in Colorado."

The working number is 3,500, but everyone agrees that's a rough total.

The state is in the midst of a 10-year study which, through the use of radio collars and other techniques, will make a more scientific census. Based on that, the number of mountain lion licenses could go up.

Since 2004, outfitters and lion hunters have had to take a course in identifying the gender of the cats so fewer females are killed. In the last couple of years, (see charts on my blog today) the number of female mountain lions killed is down 9 percent, but still, about a third of all lions killed are female.

Keefover-Ring said she'd like to see the number of females taken decline further in some areas, but said of the hunt, "everyone is pleased with it."

In the polarized world of environmental issues, that's a bit rare. But when Colorado's kill quota allowed for 700 cats to be taken, hunters never came close, because there's not enough market demand from trophy hunters.

Besides, trophy hunters want the biggest cats, the males, so they would rather not kill a female, anyway.

Paul Bohochik, a Salida-based outfitter, charges $3,500 per hunt, and the hunts go on "as long as we have snow on the ground." Based on the size of tracks in the snow and the distance they are apart, hunters can tell if they are on the trail of a large adult.

Bohochik said about 75 percent of his clients are bow hunters; half of his clients come from out of state. He uses packs of three to five dogs to track the lions and often the cats wind up sitting in trees when they are shot. For the hunters pursuing the dogs, the trek is a physically demanding one, a winter adventure.

If animal rights advocates have trouble with the image of shooting the cats down out of the trees, well, that's the way it's done.

"There are probably people in Colorado who think we should go out and kill all of them," Seraphin observed.

But then we'd be complaining about all the mule deer.

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Contact Noreen at 636-0363 or noreen@gazette.com. He appears Fridays on KOAA t.v. channels 5/30 at noon and on KRDO radio channel 1240 at 6:40 a.m.