A Field Guide to Texas Mountain Lions

1. What they did

Mountain lions were once common throughout Texas but since Anglo settlement have mostly been confined to isolated, rugged areas. They now appear to be moving back into places where they have not been recorded for well over a hundred years. Because lions are solitary and secretive and rarely seen, the author, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologist, wrote this guide so that range and wildlife managers and laypeople can recognise lion tracks and signs and interpret the traces lions leave.

The guide covers:

• Biology: size, weight, activity, breeding, kittens, dispersal, home range and diet.
• Behavioural classes and aging: transients, residents and immature lions, and how to place a lion in an age group by weight, coat spots and teeth.
• Tracks and signs: tracks, travel patterns, scrapes, scats and kills, with comparisons to bobcat, coyote and dog.
• Predation: on wildlife and on livestock.
• People and lions: nuisance lions, capture methods, and lion and human encounters.

2. What they found

Biology

• Males can measure over 7 feet from nose to tail tip. Adult males usually weigh 100 to 150 pounds, adult females 55 to 90 pounds. Wild lions live about 10 to 11 years.
• Lions are active at dawn and dusk and at night. Males and females are together only for 3 to 5 days when breeding. Litters of 2 to 3 are usual (up to 6 reported), most born in summer and autumn, after about 90 days of gestation.
• Mothers leave kittens in heavy brush, rockslides, caves or overhangs while they hunt. Young stay with their mother until 11 to 24 months old, then disperse; dispersal of up to 300 air miles has been recorded, and young males usually go further than females.
• Male home ranges (80 to 200 square miles) average 2.5 times larger than female ranges (20 to 100 square miles) and usually take in the ranges of several females.
• In Texas lions mainly eat white-tailed deer and desert mule deer, killing a deer every 3 to 5 days (a female raising cubs) to every 5 to 14 days (an adult male), more often in hot weather when meat spoils.

Behavioural classes and aging

• A transient has no home range: a young lion dispersing or an older lion displaced. Young transients are still poor hunters, often settle in livestock areas and are often killed.
• A resident has an established home range. Residents know where the other residents are.
• Kittens (0 to 16 months), subadults (17 to 23 months) and adults (24 months and older) are told apart by weight, coat spots, dependence on the mother and teeth. Adults are placed in five age groups by tooth wear and staining, from white unstained canines at 2 years to incisors worn to the gum line at 10 years and older.

Tracks

• The heel pad is 2 to 3 inches wide on the front foot and 1.75 to 2 inches on the hind foot. A lion kitten’s track is about 1.5 inches wide at around 6 months and is normally found with the mother’s tracks.
• Size alone is not enough: large hunting dogs can leave tracks as big as or bigger than a lion’s.
• The tell-tale feature is the heel pad’s three distinct lobes and two indentations at the back. Lion toes are teardrop-shaped and widely spaced; dog toes are round and close together.
• The front track is larger than the hind track and nearly symmetrical. In dogs front and hind tracks are much the same size.
• Lion tracks rarely show claws unless the lion was running or slipped; claw marks, when present, are sharp and narrow, while dog nail marks are broader. Dogs with worn nails or on frozen ground may not show nails.
• Bobcat tracks look similar but are much smaller: the front pad is seldom wider than 1.25 inches, and the toes are close together.

Travel patterns

• Lions walk in a deliberate, “businesslike” way in a straight line, seldom running except to catch prey or escape. Most tracks are walking tracks.
• The hind foot lands partly or fully in the front track, so the hind track is the one most often seen. The walking stride leaves tracks about 20 to 24 inches apart.
• Feet are placed firmly with no disturbance outside the track, and the large feet spread the weight, so tracks are shallow except in soft ground.
• Dogs and coyotes usually lope or trot, stir up dirt, overlap their tracks less consistently and weave back and forth.
• Tracks are easiest to see looking towards the sun, when they “shine”.

Scrapes

• Scrapes are markers that other lions can find, so they are placed predictably: in caves, on ridge lines, at canyon junctions and along trails.
• A lion makes a scrape with backward kicks of the hind feet, leaving two parallel marks about 6 to 8 inches long and a mound of urine-soaked debris at the back. The mound always shows the direction of travel.
• Mostly males scrape, but females sometimes do. A site seldom has more than one fresh scrape but may have several older ones. Scrapes can be confused with turkey scratching or hog rooting.

Scats

• Lion scats look like bobcat scats but larger, are segmented and hold very little plant matter.
• The contents show the time since the last kill: mostly grey matter with some hair after the first feed on internal organs, then bone chips and hair, and finally hair only. Grass may also be found.
• Scats are found under overhangs, near kills (often in large numbers), in caves (where they last for many months), in arroyos, on trails and near scrapes.

Kills

• Lions rarely kill animals over 500 pounds; reports of mature cattle and horse kills should be viewed with scepticism.
• Drag marks are wide, clear and fairly straight from the kill site to a cache in heavy cover. Lions cover a kill with grass, leaves, dirt or debris but do not bury it, often cover the removed organs close by, and may move and re-cover the carcass between feeds.
• Lions kill by crushing the prey’s oesophagus so they suffocate, biting the neck to separate the vertebrae, or biting through the brain case. Skinning back the bitten area shows canine punctures about the diameter of a pencil, much larger than other predators’ bites.
• Lions are tidy feeders, starting at the shoulders and ribs and later moving to the hindquarters and loin. They do not always cover or eat a kill, “but they always leave sign”.

Predation on wildlife and livestock

• Deer are the preferred prey, usually killed one at a time and covered; mothers with cubs sometimes kill several and cache them in different places.
• Javelina of all ages are taken, often by a bite to the brain case, and lions often “hull out” the carcass, leaving what looks like a skinned javelina. Lions that eat many javelina carry chest scars from tusks.
• Desert bighorn sheep are taken singly; lambs, young rams and ewes more than mature rams.
• Skunks, porcupines and rabbits are important small prey, especially for subadults, and some lions live to old age on small game.
• Domestic sheep kills are often multiple: up to 30 killed by one lion, with only one or two eaten and only the chosen meals covered. Goat kills of 5 to 10 at a time are not uncommon. Cattle kills, mostly yearlings and young calves, are uncommon in Texas. Foals and young horses are the main horse prey, and horse predation is less common than it was.

Nuisance lions and people

• Nuisance lions can sometimes be live-captured and relocated. Trained lion dogs are described as the only selective method; leghold snares and traps work well in professional hands; box traps have been used in urban areas.
• Warning signs before a lion and human encounter include many sightings near people, missing pet cats and dogs, and lions that seem to have lost their fear of people (usually a young male or an escaped pet). The guide lists precautions for people living in lion areas and what to do in an encounter.

3. What they concluded

• Lion tracks are distinctive and, with practice and experience, not difficult to pick out from similar tracks.
• Lions leave an abundance of sign. With careful investigation it should be possible to confirm whether a kill was made by a lion or another predator.
• Signs fade with time, wind and rain, so reports of lions should be checked as soon as possible.
• Knowing whether a lion is a transient, resident or immature is important for interpreting lion population dynamics.
• Lion and human encounters are rare, but likely to increase as housing spreads into lion habitat and deer numbers rise there. The public should not be alarmed into thinking lions are a threat.
• The challenge for managers is a management plan that addresses the concerns of both wildlife and livestock and keeps the lion part of Texas heritage.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The whole guide is about reading lion tracks and signs: track shape and measurements, the walking pattern and stride, scrapes, scats, drag marks, caches, bite marks and feeding patterns at kills, and the different ways lions kill wild and domestic prey. It compares lion tracks with dog, coyote and bobcat tracks (drawings of front and hind feet) and lion scats with dog, coyote and bobcat scats (photographs). Following trails is not described, apart from trained dogs used to bring problem lions to bay.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Aging lions by tooth wear and staining, with a drawing of the upper front teeth of a male and a female in each age class.
• Capture methods for nuisance lions: trained lion dogs, leghold snares, leghold traps (#4-1/2) and box traps.

7. Implications for conservation (from the paper)

• Range and wildlife managers increasingly need to recognise lion sign to monitor lions as they move back into historic habitat. Finding scats is one way to confirm lions where there are few.
• It is not always necessary to kill nuisance lions; live capture and relocation is possible in some cases, and any lion that must be killed should be killed humanely.
• Feeding deer and reduced hunting near new housing raise deer numbers and attract lions, and more hikers raise the chance of encounters.