Southern California mountain lions recommended for threatened status

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has recommended granting threatened taxon presumption to astir 1,400 upland lions roaming the Central Coast and Southern California, pointing to sedate threats posed by freeways, rat poison and fierce wildfires.

The determination, released Wednesday, is not the last accidental but signals a anticipation that respective clans of the iconic cougars volition beryllium listed nether the California Endangered Species Act.

It’s a determination that supporters accidental would springiness the susceptible animals a accidental astatine recovery, but detractors person argued would marque it harder to get escaped of lions that airs a information hazard to radical and livestock.

The proposal was “long overdue,” Charlton Bonham, manager of the authorities wildlife department, said during a California Fish and Game Commission meeting.

It arrives astir six years aft the Center for Biological Diversity and Mountain Lion Foundation petitioned the committee to see listing a half-dozen isolated lion populations that person suffered from being deed by cars, poisoned by rodenticides and trapped by development.

The pursuing year, successful 2020 the Commission recovered the petition mightiness beryllium warranted, giving the lions impermanent endangered taxon protections arsenic “candidates” for listing. It besides prompted the authorities wildlife section to enactment unneurotic a study to pass the commission’s last decision.

The adjacent measurement is for authorities wildlife commissioners to to ballot connected the protections, perchance successful February.

Brendan Cummings, conservation manager for Center for Biological Diversity, hailed the infinitesimal arsenic “a bully day, not conscionable for upland lions, but for Californians.”

If the commissioners follow the recommendation, arsenic helium believes they will, past the “final listing of the taxon removes immoderate uncertainty astir the state’s committedness to conserving and recovering these ecologically important, charismatic and well-loved taxon that are truthful overmuch a portion of California.”

The study recommends listing lions “in an country mostly coinciding” with what the petitioners requested, which includes the Santa Ana, San Gabriel, San Bernardino, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz and Tehachapi mountains.

It trims disconnected tiny portions on the bluish and eastbound borders of what was proposed, including cultivation lands successful the Bay Area and a southeastern information of godforsaken — areas wherever lions haven’t been documented, according to Cummings.

Officials successful the study enactment that astir of the lion groups projected for listing are contending with a deficiency of cistron travel due to the fact that municipality barriers support them from reaching 1 another.

In Southern California, lions person shown deformities from inbreeding, including kinked tails and malformed sperm. There’s an astir 1 successful 4 chance, according to research, that upland lions could go extinct successful the Santa Monica and Santa Ana mountains wrong 50 years.

The precocious P-22 — a personage upland lion that inhabited Griffith Park – personified the tribulations facing his kind. Rat poison and car collisions battered him from the wrong out. He was captured and euthanized successful precocious 2022, deemed excessively sick to instrumentality to the chaotic due to the fact that of injuries and infection.

For immoderate species, protections travel successful the signifier of stopping chainsaws oregon bulldozers. But imperiled lions, Cummings said, request their habitats stitched unneurotic successful the signifier of wildlife crossings — specified arsenic the gargantuan 1 being built implicit the 101 Freeway successful Agoura Hills. He added that developments that could restrict their question should get much scrutiny nether the projected protections.

Critics of the effort to database lion populations person said that it volition stymie residential and commercialized projects.

California is location to astir 4,170 upland lions, according to the caller report, but not each are adjacent successful their struggle.

Many lion populations, peculiarly successful northwest coastal forests, are hearty and healthy.

Protections are not being sought for those cats. Some, successful fact, would similar to spot their numbers reduced amid immoderate high-profile conflicts.

Bonham, the manager of the authorities Department of Fish and Wildlife, spoke to concerns astir nationalist information astatine the caller meeting, alluding to the tragic decease of young antheral who was mauled by a cougar past twelvemonth successful Northern California.

“These are truly delicate issues and the speech I cognize successful the coming years is going to person to grapple with each that,” said Bonham, who volition beryllium stepping down this period aft astir 15 years successful his role.

California’s lions already bask definite protections. In 1990, voters approved a measurement that designated them a “specially protected species” and banned hunting them for sport.