The Real Cougars of Orange County, Pt. 1 : LA cats get the press, but OC has twice as many

Marching down a trail deep in the woods east of San Juan Capistrano, Jason Andes pauses and squints at the ridgeline 50 feet to the south.

The promontory would provide a mountain lion with an ideal lookout over the landscape of sycamore, coastal live oak and cactus.

“I’ve never seen one in the wild,” Andes says on the overcast weekday morning. “But I can guarantee they’ve seen me.”

For the past two years, Andes has been hiding motion-triggered video cameras throughout the Santa Ana Mountains range, specifically to capture the lions. His YouTube videos, under the tag “Jasonbear,” show these woods’ resident adult male, who Andes has begun calling “Popeye” for his muscular forelegs.

There’s also a clip of a sub-adult male at risk of attack from Popeye, thanks to the highly territorial nature of adult male cougars. There’s footage of a mother with two offspring. And there are two videos of a kitten wandering by itself, unlikely to survive alone in the wild.

Andes is typically out at least once a week checking his 10 cameras, usually on his mountain bike. He’s seen plenty of bobcats, deer, fox, coyotes, raccoon, skunks, hawks and snakes firsthand.

But he’s after the lions.

“It’s amazing how adept they are at avoiding humans,” says the Fountain Valley x-ray technician, expert in seeing what others don’t but still awaiting a firsthand sighting of a lion.

The 45-year-old adjusts his daypack and resumes the hike to check his Browning trap cameras for the next best thing — freshly shot evidence of lion activity.

“They’re very stealthy. That’s why it’s such a thrill to get one with the camera. It’s like Christmas.”

Celebrity neighbors

The solitary, nocturnal predators may be the least seen of Orange County’s wildlife.

They are virtually odorless and can walk — and stalk — without making a sound. One of their many names — along with cougar, puma and panther — is ghost cat.

“It’s amazing how adept they are at avoiding humans” 

That secretive nature hasn’t kept their counterparts in Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Mountains from gaining celebrity status.

The L.A. lion known as P-22 is perhaps the most famous, thanks to evidence that he crossed both the 405 and 101 freeways to make an unlikely home in Griffith Park. There’s an online roster of P-22 and 68 other L.A. cats past and current — all memorialized with photos and biographies on a website manned by the National Park Service, which has been tracking cougars there since 2002.

“The Lions of Los Angeles” offered an extensive look at them in The New Yorker magazine in 2017 and they’ve been featured in most local papers. There are clothes, water bottles, bags — even trading cards dedicated to the Los Angeles cougars.

Orange County’s lions are comparatively unknown, despite the Santa Ana Mountains having more than twice the lion habitat as their Santa Monica counterparts and — as home to an estimated 15 to 20 adults — twice as many cougars.

The Santa Anas’ lions have their own freeway-crossing hero: M86 made it over Interstate 15 from the east, around 2011, to introduce fresh genes into the highly inbred population.

The Los Angeles and Orange County cats have similar — rare, but often controversial — interactions with people and domesticated animals on the fringes of suburbia.

One difference between the two areas’ cats is that many in L.A. have GPS collars and are monitored on an ongoing basis. In Orange County, 56 lions were monitored that way at various times from 2001 to 2015, but they’re currently unfettered by such scientific hardware.

“That means they’re free and wild. Unknown,” Andes said. “That’s pretty cool.”

‘Meat-hook’ claws

Andes has written off the kitten his cameras captured wandering alone in December.

“There are bad mountain lion moms, just like with people,” he says. “One might be a real disciplinarian and another might just let her kittens wander off. This (kitten) was probably 3- or 4-months old. I’ve read that at that age, the odds of survival are 6 percent.

“It probably starved to death.”

Kittens typically stay with their mothers for a year or two, learning to hunt and — for boy cats — to avoid the territory established by male adults. At 150 pounds or so for full-grown males, they are the largest cats in North America and the fourth largest in the world. They are known to kill younger males on their turf.

Males and females alike are built to kill, employing stalk-and-ambush techniques.

Deer is the preferred diet. Although they’ll also eat coyotes and other mammals, a deer will typically satisfy a lion’s appetite for a week.

Among hunting attributes: a top speed of 40 mph or more, a 16-foot vertical jump and a 40-foot horizontal leap.

In his forthcoming book “Path of the Puma,” wildlife biologist Jim Williams calls the animals “perfect killing machines” and describes their retractable claws as “meat hooks.”

“The stalk concludes in a lightning-fast sprint and a leap to knock the victim off balance, followed by that quick, killing bite to the windpipe,” Williams writes.

True to their clandestine tendencies, they’ll drag vanquished prey away from wildlife paths to dine in peace. For larger kills — the deer are often larger than the lion itself — the cat will cover the leftovers with dirt and foliage, returning later for subsequent meals.

‘Good publicist’

Andes attributes the L.A. cats’ higher profile to the larger human population in the surrounding cities.

Wildlife expert Winston Vickers says that’s part of the reason, but also points out that the National Park Service has dominion over the Santa Monica Mountains wildlife area and has a mission of wildlife conservation. Publicizing the lions furthers the park service’s charge.

In addition to the online biographical database of the animals, the service sends out press releases and photos of each documented lion birth, death and other significant events.

The Santa Ana Mountains, on the other hand, has a host of agencies sharing jurisdiction over the range, including the counties of Orange, Riverside and San Diego, the Irvine Ranch Conservancy, the California Department of Fish and Game, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service. None routinely announce news of the Santa Anas’ lions.

“It’s like with actors,” Vickers says, comparing the two ranges’ cats. “One has a good publicist and one doesn’t.”

Vickers, a veterinarian with UC Davis’ Wildlife Health Center and a former Orange County resident, has studied the Santa Anas cougars since 2001 and is considered their foremost expert. Past efforts have documented the lions’ lack of genetic diversity, the causes of death and working with the local toll road agency to reduce the number of lions — and other wildlife — stuck and killed by cars on the 241 toll road.

The toll-road project included $10 million of toll-agency funded fencing to funnel the animals to underpasses and culverts along the road, which bisects their natural habitat.

From 1998 to 2015, six lions and hundreds of deer, coyote and bobcats were killed on a 6-mile stretch of the 241. Since the fence was finished in late 2015, the only animals killed by cars on that stretch have been two coyotes.

The area also saw a 19-percent increase in successful 241 crossings, Vickers said.

Toll roads spokeswoman Sarah King said her agency may consider expanding the fencing next year, when its three-year study period of the existing fencing is complete.

As for publicity, Vickers, has been collaborating with The Nature Conservancy to create an online roster of the cats with photos, biographies and an interactive map that tracks the daily travels of lions who’ve had GPS collars.

But that effort is taking a backseat right now, as current priorities — and grants — have resulted in focusing the lion’s share of his attention on possible wildlife corridors along the I15 near Temecula.

Like their L.A. counterparts, Santa Anas lions’ limited gene pool is forcing a level of inbreeding that threatens their survival. An inviting underpass or wildlife bridge would connect the Santa Ana Mountains animals with those in the much vaster Eastern Peninsular Range and provide a genetic lifeline.

MIA cats

While Orange County’s mountain lions are overshadowed in the public eye by their Los Angeles cousins, they have captured the imagination of a small core of cougar enthusiasts, including Andes’. And he may be giving the notorious loners as much presence online as anyone.

“Nobody ever sees them in the wild,” he says, making his way down the trail toward his first camera in the area. “They’re the apex predator. They’re gorgeous and powerful. It’s really a joy to show them to everyone.”

The bachelor says his hobbies of fishing and mountain biking have been getting less and less attention thanks to his growing fascination with cougars. With a hint of pride, he announces two more cameras are on order.

As for the potential danger of hoofing around in lion country, Andes points out that attacks on humans are extremely rare.

“The biggest threat I feel out here is from another person,” he says. “Then snakes. Then mountain lions.”

His videos contribute to a web of lion mysteries. Last November, two orphaned kittens were found in Silverado Canyon — one in the backyard of a house — and were later given a home at the Oakland Zoo.

Ten days before they were found, an area resident posted an online account of hitting and killing a female lion on Santiago Canyon Road.

Andes wonders if they were the family caught on one of his cameras October. Or was that family from October the same one captured by his cameras twice in May? And where were they now?

“Since May, I have not seen the mom or her kittens,” he says. “It doesn’t mean something bad happened — it just means I haven’t seen them. But I worry about them all the time. Especially that little one that was all alone.”

And then, of course there’s Popeye, the large resident adult male east of San Juan Capistrano with a confident carriage and distinguishing stride.

“When he comes on camera, he looks like he’s in charge of the show. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows the terrain.”

Andes cuts through the underbrush to a wash and squats to open the camera planted on a stick amid the rocks.

“This is the exciting part — but it can be very disappointing. I can go weeks without getting any mountain lions.”

He slips the memory card into a video viewer. There are thirteen videos since he last checked it 10 days before, the Holy fire having made the area inaccessible in the interim.

“A fox,” he says, flipping through the motion-triggered videos. “Another fox… Wind…”

Then…

“There he is! That’s the big male. I can tell by his big Popeye forearms.”