While riding his orange Kubota tractor at approximately 2:30 p.m. Dec. 9, Steve Alexander, who lives roughly three miles east of Saint Louise Regional Hospital in rural Gilroy, saw a mountain lion cross his path just 40 feet away.
The predator – a native to wooded areas of Santa Clara County – appeared to weigh between 120 to 130 pounds and was not fully grown, estimated Alexander.
“I was moving dirt from my neighbor’s yard to my yard,” said Alexander, who lives on the 9000 block of Sugar Babe Drive. “I looked in the middle of my yard and there was this brown animal. I took a couple blinks and looked at it while driving the tractor towards it and it quickly went away.”
The big cat, which Alexander estimates was at least 4 feet long, walked on the north edge of his 2.5-acre property along a walking path, jumped up a couple of 3-foot tall retaining walls and disappeared into the nearby trees.
“I looked for it and that was the last I saw of it since,” Alexander recalled. “I think it was a lot more frightened than I was of it because it was moving out smartly – not running away – and it looked back at me twice to see what this big orange tractor thing was.”
The lion did not seem to be a threat, Alexander assured.
“We live in an area where there are wild boars, deer, rabbits, foxes and mountain lions,” he resolved. “We’ve had mountain lions out in this area in the past; that’s just life in the country.”
Alexander’s neighbor, Brian Cunningham, notified the California Department of Fish and Wildlife on Dec. 12. Cunningham said he was concerned for the public safety of his neighbors, himself and passersby.
“It casually looked the premises over and it didn’t scamper off; that’s a mountain lion that is not afraid of humans and, if anything, is somewhat familiar with them,” Cunningham opined.
According to Colleen Grzan, director of Animal Care at the Morgan Hill-based Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center, human and mountain lion encounters in South County are on the “upswing” because business and residential developments are encroaching on the predators’ natural habitat.
“We do know that lions are close by in Morgan Hill and Gilroy (through) plenty of eyewitness accounts, but I don’t how many,” Grzan wrote via email. “I don’t believe their population is declining, but may appear to be increasing due to people moving into their territory, loss of habitat and their search for food.”
She points to a 2009 study conducted by researchers with the University of California at Santa Cruz that theorized between 30 to 70 mountain lions live in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a portion of which spills over into the western edge of Gilroy. Lions have also been spotted in the Coyote Valley just north of Morgan Hill, Grzan said.
But developing regional estimates on the population of cougars in South County has not been a high priority for the CDFW, according to Senior Environmental Scientist Marc Kenyon.
“Mountain lion populations are extremely costly to enumerate,” he noted.
Still, Grzan points out that “lions are intelligent, solitary animals and will avoid humans – who they do not see as food – as much as possible.”
But Cunningham isn’t convinced the mountain lion that wandered into his neighborhood was friendly.
“No one who lives in the country or suburbia of Gilroy is looking to get eaten by a lion; no one bargains for that,” Cunningham said. “If the lions are walking around our area, they’re going to be in the city limits of Gilroy – believe me.”
Mountain lions are predominantly nocturnal predators, according to the CDFW, and a mountain lion meandering past a running tractor and a human is rare.
Even more unlikely, according to the department, is a fatal attack by a mountain lion on a human. The most recent calculation by the CDFW estimates the statewide mountain lion population sits somewhere between 4,000 to 6,000.
“Statistically speaking, a person is 1,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a mountain lion,” the CDFW wrote on its website. “That said, mountain lions are wild animals – and like any wildlife – can be dangerous.”
Since 1986, there have been 14 attacks in California verified by CDFW and three of those were fatal.
The first double fatality ever recorded occurred in July of 1909 in Morgan Hill, when 38-year-old Isola Kennedy and 8-year-old Earl Wilson succumbed to their injuries after they were mauled by a rabies-infected cougar, according to Morgan Hill Times archives.
“Sometimes, disease will cause an animal to behave strangely,” the CDFW explains. “Usually, there is no apparent explanation for why a mountain lion seems to abandon its instinctive wariness of humans. Studies of collared mountain lions show that they often co-exist around people, unseen and unheard.”
If a mountain lion is determined to be a threat to public safety, or if a cougar is displaying “unusually bold or aggressive behavior towards humans,” the department will kill the animal, according to information on the CDFW’s website.
With limited and shrinking hunting grounds, Grzan said, mountain lions may follow their natural and preferred prey – deer – into the suburbs of South County.
If residents feed deer, that in turn attracts the lions, she added.
In 1990, California voters passed Proposition 117 – which banned the hunting of mountain lions. But a select number of depredation permits are issued each year by the CDFW if a specific lion is targeting livestock or pets. Since 1972, hunters in Santa Clara County have killed 18 cougars through the program.
Mountain lions may only be killed if a depredation permit is issued to stop the killing of farm or household animals, to preserve public safety, to protect Bighorn sheep or in the immediate act of self-defense or in the defense of others.
The close encounter with a cougar on his property didn’t scare him, according to Alexander, who recalls the animal did not snarl and slinked away without incident.
“It was their land before it was ours,” he said.
