Big cat caught in city center

By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — A male cougar was seen Monday walking across a parking lot not far from an Ironwood Drive day care center, before it leapt up a tree where Coeur d’Alene authorities found and removed it.

The urban mountain lion that Coeur d’Alene police, Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologists and the fire department helped to dart, drug, and drop from a ponderosa pine tree around 1:30 p.m. on the 1100 block of Ironwood Drive may have been the same cat observed last month at Tubbs Hill, said IDFG biologist Jim Hayden.

“It could easily be the same cat, or it may not be,” Hayden said. “We just don’t know.”

Cougars have been known to cover more than 70 miles in a night, and their stealth often allows them to go unnoticed.

“They move around so easily, even in town,” Hayden said.

Hayden said the 2-year-old male caught Monday will be euthanized instead of freed into the wild.

Cats often return to places where they have been captured, Hayden said. And returning young mountain lions to the wild isn’t a cure-all because young cats dropped into unfamiliar territory are often attacked and killed by mature, territorial males.

“It’s a human safety issue,” Hayden said. “The safety of humans takes precedence.”

An expanding mountain lion population across the West has resulted in frequent sightings of cougars looking for new territory, or expanding their range. In Idaho, authorities in Pocatello and Boise have their share of cat calls, Hayden said, although mountain lion sightings in greater Coeur d’Alene are not as frequent.

“It might not be usual for Coeur d’Alene, but it’s not unusual across the West,” Hayden said.

Monday’s cat was observed earlier in the day near Ramsey Road, before employees at Qualfon saw it cross their parking lot, which is separated by a strip of trees from the Little Folks child care center.

Caylin Lopes, who works at Qualfon, left for a break in the morning but couldn’t return to work because the streets were blocked. Authorities would not allow her back to the call center where the cat was perched in the tree outside her office window.

She sat on her car hood across the street and watched the cat catching unfold.

“I watched it from the beginning,” Lopes said.

Fish and Game officers darted the animal twice, she said, and police officers attempted to knock the cat out of the tree with a bean bag.

“We were trying to give it a jolt,” Hayden said, “Enough to lose its balance.”

Instead, the drugged big cat flopped asleep on a limb.

Larry Vulles, of Post Falls, watched the incident from the same parking lot on the south side of Ironwood Drive. He came for business, but couldn’t get back on the road after the streets were blocked.

“I got a few pictures,” Vulles said.

Firefighters and game biologists in the bucket of a department ladder truck reached the drugged lion and pulled it from the limb. It fell through the branches to the ground where it was loaded into a crate.

“It’s pretty unusual to have a cat so deep in Coeur d’Alene,” Vulles said.

Lopes said she wasn’t afraid of the cougar. She feared more for its well-being.

“My fear was for the cat,” she said.

IDFG is concerned by previous fatal cougar attacks this year in Washington, where a cyclist was killed in May, and most recently in Oregon this month when a cougar claimed the life of a Gresham woman near Mount Hood.