Habitat Fragmentation and Inbreeding
Habitat fragmentation and destruction cause big problems for far-ranging animals like pumas. There are obvious effects, like when 16M got hit by a car on Highway 17, but there are more cryptic problems as well. Here is a recent article on how roads and human...
Male and female mountain lion share a meal
Here is a rare glimpse of the chivalrous side of the male puma, stepping aside to share his meal with a female. Males aren't always that nice, however, and will often attack or even kill animals that try to feed on their kills. In the wild, pumas often cache their...
Mountain Lions now coming to your Apple computer
Apple's launch of Mountain Lion OS is a great time to draw attention to the real animals roaming above the hills of Cupertino. Check out UCSC's news release on the SC Puma Project's recent findings.
Update on 35M
Last month, we told you about 35M, a young dispersing male who was traveling all around the Bay Area looking for a place to settle down (see his old map here). Our recent data on him shows that he might have settled down a bit west of Portola Valley near Palo Alto. Of...
Update on 23F’s kittens
I know a lot of you enjoyed the photos of 23F's kittens. Since we visited them, 23F has moved her kittens to several different hiding places (as a good mother should) to keep them safe. However, before we took off, we left a trail camera there to see if we could...
Mountain lions get hairballs too!
We've been placing motion-sensing trail cameras in the Santa Cruz Mountains since 2008. Our cameras have captured pumas sleeping, playing, calling to each other, scent marking, and courting. However, never before have we caught a mountain lion behaving like this! This...
Survivor
If the Santa Cruz pumas had a survivor contest, then 16M would undoubtedly be the winner. For the past two years, he's made a dangerous living straddling both sides of Highway 17, a sinuous freeway connecting San Jose and Santa Cruz. All highways, for obvious reasons,...
Self Portraits
Most animals are really difficult to observe since they generally run away when humans approach. One way we get around that is by using motion detecting cameras. These cameras allow animals to take their own self portraits by triggering the shutter as they walk in...
On the road: 35M’s wild journey
When a young male kitten grows up, he must leave the relative safety of his mother's protection to venture out into the world alone. If he hopes to survive and build his own territory, he must successfully avoid being killed by other male lions, including his own...
Catching a predator: puma edition
Studying pumas in semi-populated areas presents some interesting challenges. We caught and replaced the GPS collar on 19F a couple of weeks ago in the hills above Los Gatos/Monte Sereno, and Paul Houghtaling, one of our field biologists, and Yiwei describe her story...
