This story first appeared in The Outsider, the premium outdoor newsletter by Jason Blevins.
In it, he covers the industry from the inside out, plus the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.
EVERGREEN – Colorado Parks and Wildlife is drafting a plan to manage mountain lions on the Front Range, seeking to minimize human-lion encounters while keeping the lion population stable and healthy. The agency’s tour to educate the public and get feedback began Feb. 22 in Evergreen and will conclude with a virtual meeting March 6 and an in-person gathering March 7 in Colorado Springs.
The meetings are occurring against the backdrop of the advocacy group Cats Aren’t Trophies’ work to gather signatures to get Proposition 91, a ballot proposal to outlaw trophy hunting of lions, bobcats and lynx in Colorado, on the November ballot. And they come just months after CPW released 10 wolves on the Western Slope as directed by Proposition 114, a ballot initiative that was narrowly approved by voters in 2020.
So perhaps no one was shocked when Mark Lamb, CPW’s Area 1 wildlife manager, laid out some ground rules at the start of the Feb. 22 meeting.
“We’re not going to talk about wolves. We’re not going to talk about the ballot initiative,” he said. “If anyone with opposing views starts to argue, we’ll be showing them the door,” he added.
The warning didn’t dampen the mood of 40 or so people gathered at Evergreen Fire Station #2 to hear changes to the current East Slope Mountain Lion Plan, which hasn’t been updated since the mid 2000s, CPW spokesperson Kara Van Hoose said.
The update follows one CPW made to the West Slope Mountain Lion plan in 2020, “in recognition that larger, regional management scales are most closely aligned with the wide-ranging movements of lions across Colorado’s landscapes.” The previous plan operated on the assumption that CPW’s 13 Data Analysis Units, each representing the year-around range of a single group of lions, were too small to properly manage the solitary, low-density, wide-ranging animals.
The new plan combined the 13 units into two units and streamlined lion management goals. The old plan aimed to suppress lion numbers in some units and stabilize them in others. The new one focused on stabilization across the units.
Van Hoose said CPW began tracking collared mountain lions east of the Continental Divide in the mid-2000s to see how far they ranged.
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Data showed they ventured far beyond the boundaries of game management units, with individuals roaming as far north as Casper, Wyoming, east into Kansas, south into Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, and up and down the Front Range in historic numbers.
But lion management is difficult “because of different values that people place on this particular species,” Lance Carpenter, senior biologist for the northeast region, told the crowd in Evergreen. “For some folks, just knowing lions are on the landscape in strong numbers is important. Others simply enjoy hunting and eating lion meat. Some think the species shouldn’t be hunted at all. And others might be worried about how lions will affect prey populations, or have safety concerns that arise when lions are in close proximity to communities.”
Managing a “high and expanding human population on the East Slope” that “intersects with excellent mountain lion habitat,” is also challenging, he said.
“That’s the problem we face every single day,” Van Hoose later added. “With more and more people choosing to live here and expanding into places not previously developed, mountain lions and humans are interacting more than ever.”
CPW is proposing a Front Range mountain lion management plan that mirrors the Western Slope plan.
If approved, six existing data analysis units running from the Wyoming border to New Mexico will be consolidated into one unit. The agency will also shift management goals from stabilization and suppression to stabilization only. The new plan will study human-caused mortality and the number of known females killed yearly, Carpenter said.
Some lion hunters at the Evergreen meeting said they were confused by the plan. A representative from United Houndsmen of Colorado was concerned combining units would limit the number of available lion tags, reducing hunter opportunities.
A CPW employee responded that the agency is going to “re-evaluate which game management units are with specific groupings [of lions],” with an overall objective of stability, and “may be able to increase harvest in some places while reducing it in others.”
Cats Aren’t Trophies is criticizing the agency’s policies around using hunting as a means to manage mountain lion populations. The group, citing multiyear studies by CPW of the management of bears and mountain lions in the Piceance and Upper Arkansas valleys that began in 2018, said in a press release there is no evidence to support the claim that hunting mountain lions “is an effective way to make more deer, to reduce or prevent conflict with livestock, pets or humans, or for public safety.”
But other studies have shown heavy predation can lead to vast reductions in prey, and the fundamental premise of the North American Model for Wildlife Conservation is that harvesting predators does help ungulates.
The state has not released data from its studies, budgeted at $4.6 million and funded by federal fees collected on the sale of hunting equipment and the state wildlife cash fund, which is stocked mostly by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. But CPW spokesman Travis Duncan said during the study, “the harvest was both increased and reduced for various periods of time” and that the overall harvest during the project’s 10-year duration will be 25% less (127 fewer lions killed over 10 years) than would have occurred without the study.”
The goal of the East Slope Lion Management Plan “is to maintain stable mountain lion populations in the region by defining and implementing clear annual thresholds for adult female harvest, and total human-caused mortality (e.g., harvest and roadkill or agricultural conflicts),” Duncan added.
Van House said “on a statewide level, we have 3,800 to 4,400 independent lions not including kittens,” with “one of the higher densities in the country on the Front Range.”
Female lions can have one to six kittens in a year with the average being two to four, she added, and survival rates depend “on a lot of different factors.”
“But mountain lions are elusive. They’re difficult to find. And you can only hunt them in a small season,” which started Nov. 27 and ends March 31.
CPW will hold two final informational meetings with opportunities for public feedback on March 6 and 7. They will work on the draft plan during March and April. After a 30-day a public comment period in May, it will go to the CPW wildlife commission for approval in two meetings during late summer and early fall.
For more information on this and other issues, visit engageCPW.org.