Mountain lions can usually escape wildfires, but the blazes can reduce their habitat

Wildfires, like the Holy fire that torched 26,000 acres of the Santa Ana Mountains area in August, don’t typically pose a significant threat to cougars, expert sprinters as well as long-distance travelers who are skilled at escaping such threats.

But one study of Southern California cougars — also known as mountain lions and pumas — suggests that the increasing frequency and intensity of fires could reduce the animal’s habitat, which is already shrinking because of urbanization.

Cougar expert Winston Vickers worked on both that study and one on mountain lion mortality in Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties. The mortality study, which looked at 36 cougar deaths from 2001 to 2013, found that just two cats died from fires.

“They moved away from the fire as it moved,” Vickers said of the two fire fatalities. “Then they moved back into the fire area, burned their feet and died. They couldn’t hunt and probably starved to death. They didn’t get burns on the rest of their bodies.”

In order to avoid firefighters, the two cats may have returned too early to the burn area, said Vickers, a veterinarian at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center.

“Mountains lions mostly dodge the fire pretty well unless they get caught in between two areas that are burning,” he said.

Long term effects

The other study, which looked at the longer term effect of fires on cougars, found that wildfires create and reinvigorate deer grazing areas. That can increase deer populations, bolstering the favored prey of mountain lions and attracting the cats to those new and renewed grazing areas.

But while they may make forays into more open areas while hunting, the notoriously stealthy mountain lions prefer more heavily vegetated terrain. The increase in wildfires poses a threat to that.

“Fire-inducing habitat changes in an urbanizing landscape will reduce the quality or availability of puma habitat in an ecosystem where their persistence is already threatened by urbanization and habitat fragmentation,” according to the study.