 |
 |
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|||
Lion in the garden?
Visiting scholar David Baron examines western cougar problem that's eastward-bound
By Brian Fitzgerald
|
|
|
David Baron Photo by Vernon Doucette |
|
|
|
Lynda Walters envied her parents when they told her about the mountain lion that had walked in front of their pickup truck. She could only imagine the thrill of watching one of the leopard-sized cats strutting right across Sunshine Canyon Drive. “I wish I could see one,” she said.
Be careful what you wish for.
Two months later, during her daily afternoon jog down a ravine in a park near Boulder, Colo., the 28-year-old medical student's dream came true. “Cool,” she said to herself when she saw the lion on the opposite side of a creek, 15 feet away.
“Lynda shouted, ‘Hyaaa!' and threw her arms skyward to assume a formidable air,” writes David Baron, a visiting scholar at COM, in his 2003 book The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature (W. W. Norton). “The lion did not budge. Lynda extended her right hand toward the rocky slope behind her, fetched a fist-sized chunk of granite, and hurled it at the cougar's feet. The lion hissed and crept closer. As Lynda stood, perplexed by the cat's recalcitrance, her peripheral vision detected movement 90 degrees to the right. She turned and saw, on the low granite cliff that defined the edge of Dry Gulch, a second cougar, crouched. It circled slowly behind her. Panic descended.”
She knew that these creatures had mauled dogs in the area from time to time, but in her past encounters with potentially dangerous wildlife such as coyotes and bears, the animals had always scampered away when they saw her. But not this predator.
Baron's narrative of the incident turns even more frightening as he relates Walter's attempt to escape. She scurried up the embankment on all fours, like an animal, and threw a second rock. At this point the reader can't take it for granted that the young woman survived. The book describes her actions — yelling, throwing her arms up, tossing rocks — so she must have survived to tell the tale. Or did she? Maybe Baron's account of her reaction is based on speculation, a writer re-creating the event using conjecture, along with evidence found by rangers at the scene: dislodged stones and tracks. Would she live or die?
Walters climbed a small tree no more than a human's height. She felt a sharp pain in her right calf: one of the lions had followed her and scratched three claw marks down her leg. “This is it, Lynda thought. I'm going to die,” writes Baron. She stomped on the lion's head, knocking it to the ground. But the second lion jumped on the trunk and began creeping upward. Walter snapped off a dead branch and began stabbing at the cougar, and it retreated. But both cats waited at the base as night began to fall. “Lynda could hear civilization — cars snaking through Fourmile Canyon, children playing in a nearby subdivision, a dog barking,” writes Baron. But in the forest, she “became an intimate participant in nature's food chain.”
Fortunately for Walters, the lions heard a deer rustling across the gulch. They left to pursue it. She quickly climbed down and fled upslope.
A crime thriller
At present, Baron teaches Science News Writing 2: Feature Writing at COM's Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism. But he wrote Beast in the Garden “in the style of a novel,” he says. “It's largely a story I tell.” According to Publisher's Weekly, it “reads like a crime thriller.” Baron also describes the book as a parable — about a wildlife species scaring residents in one small town, but exposing much larger issues. “As rural areas in the United States are shrinking, raccoons, foxes, skunks, and even coyotes are common in people's backyards,” he says. “As you may recall, a few years ago, a small child on Cape Cod was attacked by a coyote. And in New Jersey, black bears have increased twentyfold in the past 30 years. The bears are coming into contact with people in dangerous ways. Because they have been getting into garbage cans, and even breaking into houses, New Jersey just had its first bear hunt in 33 years.”
But first and foremost, Baron's book is a chronicle of a community struggling with a cougar problem. He points out that the animal had been hunted almost out of existence in the 1800s. After the species became protected, however, it made a comeback in the western United States. In the late 1980s, Boulder started preserving open space, surrounding itself with a greenbelt, which was repopulated with mule deer and mountain lions. “When the mule deer population exploded and started walking into town, people began feeding them, and they became tame,” says Baron. “What happened next was that the lions followed the deer into backyards, and they also hunted domestic dogs and cats. By 1990, they were beginning to eye people as potential prey. One lion was seen perusing a frat party on the University of Colorado campus. And in June of that year, Lynda Walters was chased up a tree.”
Then, on January 16, 1991, the body of 18-year-old Scott Lancaster, guarded by a mountain lion, was found behind Clear Creek High School in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Denver. He had gone out for his daily run two days earlier and was killed in the middle of the afternoon, in view of homes and an interstate highway. “This was the first fatal mountain lion attack in all of North America in more than 100 years,” says Baron.
It was a tragedy that wasn't supposed to happen. “This shocked not only the local community, but the scientific community,” he says. “Until Scott was killed, scientists believed that mountain lions would never attack people with the intention of eating them. Previous attacks occurred because the lions felt cornered, or were rabid. But everything about the condition of Scott's body, the way the lion was feeding on him — the organs first — suggested that it saw him simply as prey.”
Chumming the water
In the 13 years since Lancaster's death, mountain lions have attacked more than 45 people in the United States and Canada. Five of the victims have died. “The point of my book is not to make people paranoid about mountain lions,” says Baron. “It's to let people know that they should be more thoughtful in their dealings with wildlife.” He points out that residents of Boulder originally welcomed the deer coming into town, even putting salt blocks on their properties for the creatures to lick. As one scientist told him, these suburbanites were essentially “chumming the water” for lions. “Now, people are not only shooing deer away,” he says, “they are also putting tops on their fences, so mountain lions are having a more difficult time getting into yards to attack pets.”
Baron is hoping that other communities learn from this lesson, especially the ones in eastern Massachusetts now being visited by coyotes and bears. He advises residents in these areas not to leave pets outside unattended or put dishes of dog food in their backyards. He says that insisting on having bird feeders is simply begging for a bear to come into the yard.
Baron has reported on science, medicine, technology, and the environment for WBUR, the National Public Radio (NPR) station at BU, for more than 15 years. In 1996 he traveled to Auburn, Calif., to produce a story for NPR's All Things Considered on the politics of cougar management — a jogger had been killed by a mountain lion there two years earlier. “This book stems from the stories I covered on wildlife issues out in the West in the middle and late 1990s,” he says. In 1998, he received a Ted Scripps Fellowship in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado, where he did much of the research for The Beast in the Garden. He has also served as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.
Mountain lions, now abundant in the West, are spreading back towards the East — they've been reported in Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Minnesota. “But there's some evidence they may be even as far east as Michigan, Maine, Vermont, and Virginia,” Baron says. If you encounter one, he says, you should make yourself look big and intimidating, shout loud, and back away slowly. However, he points out, if you actually see a lion, you're probably going to be all right. “The real danger comes from the lion you don't see,” he says. “They prefer to surprise their prey and attack from behind.” Also, a lion is far less likely to attack a person with a companion nearby. “The best advice is, if you're heading into lion country, don't go alone,” he says.
Baron reiterates that he doesn't want his book to unduly frighten people. After all, these type of attacks are still extremely rare. “But they're not nearly as rare as they once were,” he says.
On Wednesday, February 11, at 7 p.m., David Baron will talk about his book The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature at Barnes & Noble's Level 5 Reading Room in Kenmore Square. For more information, call 617-267-8484.
9
January 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations