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Q & A with Wildlife Conservation Biologist Mike Kutilek
Mike Kutilek- POST: Mountain lions are elusive animals. What do we know about their behavior and habitat needs here in the Bay Area?
- Mike Kutilek (MK):We know there are resident populations here in the Santa Cruz Mountain range and the Diablo range in eastern Santa Clara County. Mountain lions are generally shy and retiring and avoid people, but sometimes they do wander into areas of human habitation. They need large, contiguous tracts of natural habitat that have adequate cover, water and prey. Deer and wild pigs are their main prey in this area.
- POST: What poses the greatest threat to mountain lions in our region?
- MK: It’s probably the same factor posing a threat throughout their range, and that’s habitat fragmentation. Lions can suffer catastrophes like any animal, and if a population dies out in one fragment and there’s no opportunity for other lions to migrate into that fragment and repopulate it, then that fragment no longer has a lion population.
- POST: In 1999, POST saved 2,438-acre Rancho Cañada del Oro in south Santa Clara County. How does land protection on this scale help address the habitat needs of mountain lions?
- MK: We know there is a wildlife corridor in Coyote Valley that allows migration between the Diablo and Santa Cruz ranges. Rancho sits just above the valley floor on the Santa Cruz side, so it very likely makes up a portion of the corridor. It’s also a lovely piece of land—a little vignette of what that area should look like for lions and other living things.
- POST: On a personal level, do you think mountain lion habitat should be protected?
- MK: I think we should protect habitat to protect entire ecosystems. We have to protect biodiversity because that biodiversity provides so much. We also need to understand it because if we are going to practice good conservation, we can’t do it just based on our ideas of how these systems work. We need good data. Too much of the time we think we understand something and we make some conservation decision only to find out it was absolutely the wrong thing to do because we didn’t understand the intricacies of the system.
