Review by Ed Quillen
Widlife – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Beast in the Garden – A Modern Parable of Man and Nature
by David Baron
Published in 2004 by W.W. Norton
ISBN 0-393-05807-7
IN MY NEARLY 55 years in Colorado, which includes a fair amount of time outdoors, I’ve never seen a mountain lion, except in a cage. But mountain lions have almost certainly seen me. Twenty years ago, that was not a real concern, since the conventional wisdom had it that healthy, well-adjusted mountain lions do not attack people. Besides, I almost always had a dog with me outdoors, and the big cats, perhaps from an atavistic fear of wolves, were scared of dogs.
After reading this book, a detailed account of mountain lions and their frightening and sometimes deadly actions along the Front Range of Colorado about 15 years go, it is a concern. Especially when I see deer wandering around in broad daylight in Salida, and realize that where there are deer, there are mountain lions.
The mountain lion, Felis concolor, goes by many names: puma, cougar, panther. Before Europeans arrived, it ranged from southern Alaska to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, giving it the widest distribution of any mammal in North America. It’s one of three wild cats in Colorado, and by far the biggest (the other two are the lynx and bobcat). A mature cougar can stretch to nine feet, which includes two feet of tail, and weigh 200 pounds. It can leap a six-foot fence and easily drag a fresh-killed calf a quarter-mile to its den.
Colorado pioneers saw the lion, like the wolf and the grizzly bear, as a threat to themselves and their livelihoods. Lions were killed whenever they appeared and bounties were paid. Wolves and grizzlies became extinct. But lions, perhaps because of their reclusive nature, managed to hold on, and they became a game animal in 1965.
Hardly anyone ever saw them then. But Colorado changed, as did the kind of people who live here, and that’s the heart of David Baron’s story which culminates on Jan. 14, 1991, when a healthy young man, Clear Creek High School senior Scott Lancaster, was killed by a mountain lion as he jogged near Idaho Springs, almost within earshot of Interstate 70.
Most of this book is about Boulder, though. The city sits right against the foothills, and people build homes up those canyons. They plant and water gardens, and they also want to be “close to nature,” so when the mule deer show up, they’re not chased away.
The mulies start to see these yards as havens. Deer are normally crepuscalar — active around dawn and twilight, and idle or sleeping through full daylight and darkness. But all those gardens and gentle homeowners allowed the deer to change their routine to include daylight hours.
Mountain lions soon adjusted their behavior to fit their prey’s, and by the late 1980s, sightings of cougars were so frequent that Boulder put someone in charge of collecting the data, so that the Colorado Division of Wildlife might be able to act — at least by putting radio collars on some lions so more could be learned about their ways.
But as Baron explains, the DOW wasn’t in any hurry to do anything about the cougars of Boulder County. The DOW had a solution: Allow hunting on the city’s open-space land in the foothills to reduce the deer population. A further benefit: the surviving deer would be a lot more cautious about going out in broad daylight.
Boulderites were vehement about forbidding hunting on their open space. Deprived of its management tool, the DOW basically washed its hands of Boulder County.
The sightings continued, and pets began to disappear, especially in Coal Creek Canyon. Then livestock was killed. But at a community meeting at the firehall, convened to address the problem of pet-eating pumas, public sentiment was on the side of the lions — not those who had lost pets.
Thus the DOW in Boulder County “hardened its policy of leaving lions alone. Cougars loitering among homes and eating pets would not be shot. They would not be tranquilized and relocated. They would not be fitted with radio collars so that their movements could be tracked.”
But the cougars continued tracking. On June 2, 1990, medical student Lynda Walters jogged in the foothills west of Boulder, hoping to see some wildlife. She did. One mountain lion sent her scrambling up a tree. “When she was halfway to the top, the tree shook as if struck by a sudden wind. The second lion had now jumped onto the trunk and was creeping upward. Lynda scrambled higher and faster while the cat climbed with slow precision, picking its way through the limbs, its eyes focused on the woman above.”
And then there was the death of Scott Lancaster, followed in 1997 by the second fatal lion attack in Colorado history, the death of a 10-year-old boy in Rocky Mountain National Park. This raises a big question, which the author tries to address: Why wasn’t there an uproar, a wide public demand to exterminate lions?
Baron weaves a fascinating account of people, geography, and mountain lions. His research is meticulous, and he has a good eye. This book is not exactly pleasant reading — I found myself glancing over my shoulder on walks in the woods — but it’s about something that should concern us all.
The traditional rural resident — a rancher or prospector — had no qualms about killing mountain lions. The new exurban residents like their deer nearby, and if that means the possibility of entering the food chain, well, so far, they’ve been willing to take their chances.
But it’s an issue that won’t go away, and The Beast in the Garden ought to be required reading for everyone who’s seen deer in broad daylight — which is most of us in Central Colorado.