Winston Vickers’ research aims to give local mountain lions a fighting chance

Just as their neighbors in the Santa Monica Mountains, the survival of mountain lions in Orange County is threatened by inbreeding, car crashes and rodenticide.

Winston Vickers might have one of the most suspenseful screen feeds in the state: His team has installed dozens of strategically placed cameras in the Orange County backcountry to track where mountain lions roam. As we speak, he is waiting for a mountain lion to approach the deer carcass one of the four biologists on his team laid out in the Santa Ana Mountains. They are hoping to lure a cougar with a free meal so that Vickers can collar it with a GPS tracker.

Director of the California Mountain Lion Project at UC Davis’ Wildlife Health Center, Vickers, 68, is one of the most experienced cougar experts in the U.S. He raves about his close encounters with the majestic predators.

“When you handle them, oh my gosh, look at their claws and those teeth! They weigh about the same as me,” the tall and trim gray-haired researcher says with playful envy in his voice, “but holy smokes, unlike me, they’re all muscle!”

His research focus has an ominous background: Just as their neighbors in the Santa Monica Mountains, the survival of mountain lions in Orange County is threatened by inbreeding, car crashes and rodenticide.

“Cars and roads, in a nutshell, are the main cause of their deaths,” Vickers says via Zoom from his office.

According to his count, roughly 20 to 25 mountain lions live in the Santa Ana Mountains, and a few get killed each year in crashes. His cameras catch thousands of hikers who trek through these mountains or Orange County parks every year, unaware that a puma might be watching them. But the territory of roughly 2,000 square miles is hemmed in by major freeways and encroaching urban development.

“Especially the I-15 is a very substantial barrier to the lions’ movement.” Vickers has documented several mountain lions reaching the freeway, sitting for hours as cars and trucks speed past, and then turning around because they don’t dare to cross. Therefore, inbreeding is a growing problem — already, some newborns in OC show deformities such as kinked tails, and Vickers was instrumental in a recent study which discovered that 93 percent of the males’ sperm is abnormal.

“There’s a race to the bottom,” he says.

Along with other experts, he estimates that the mountain lions will be locally extinct by 2050 if the state does not take drastic measures to help them survive.

Vickers grew up on a cattle farm in the Ozarks, the son of a country vet. “We treated every creature, small and large, from cats to cows.” He describes himself as an outdoorsy kid, “always fishing and hunting and canoeing.” He vowed not to follow in his father’s footsteps but after a few semesters of studying engineering, the call of the wild was too strong, and he switched to veterinary medicine after all.

“What my dad really gave me was appreciation for animals and caring about their welfare.”

Vickers became a vegetarian when he started to work as a veterinarian, “because I couldn’t really see the value of working so hard to save the life of one cow only to then kill it for a steak.”

He worked as a regular vet in Arkansas and California for nearly two decades while also accepting every chance to treat wildlife. His fascination with big cats even led him all the way to Nepal to study snow leopards. A second degree in epidemiology at UC Davis inspired him to join the Mountain Lion Project there in 2002. Initially, the vets had started out researching the endangered bighorn sheep in Anza Borrego State Park and considered mountain lions a threat to them.

“We were soon shocked to find that the mountain lions had an unusually high mortality rate,” Vickers remembers. Thus, the researchers started tracking mountain lions, accumulating 20 years of detailed knowledge about the reclusive animals, “and the data has become valuable for conservation to show their most important habitats and corridors.”

Vickers is among those calling for wildlife crossings over major freeways so that the local mountain lions can mix and mate with peers from neighboring habitats. In the Santa Monica Mountains, Caltrans will break ground this month for the world’s biggest wildlife overpass, the so-called Liberty Crossing over the busy 101. The new bridge will cost a whopping $88 million. The sum sounds outrageous until one considers the alternative: In the last three years, wildlife crashes in California have cost more than $1 billion. Wildlife crossings have proven to reduce fatal deer collisions by 98.5% in Utah and nearly 90% in Colorado. Apex predators like pumas also act as “ecological brokers,” a recent study found, and play “an outsize role” for the health and biodiversity of their territories.

Vickers hopes he can convince the state and conservationists to add several smaller crossings in Orange County as well and improve the small existing freeway underpass near Temecula Creek. He soon will start meeting with experts and engineers from Caltrans, the Nature Conservancy, National Park Service and other organizations to determine the best designs and locations for crossings “to help as many species as possible. Mountain lions have become the poster child, but the barriers affect many other animals, including birds that don’t like to fly over freeways.”

As a scientist, he supplies the data, but he also understands his job to advocate for the animals with locals. Though California is the only U.S. state that made hunting mountain lions illegal, the animals are not just brought down by their genes but also by guns.

“The second leading cause of death is people shooting them because they’ve killed their goat, their dog or their chicken,” Wickers says. “I care a lot about these animals, too, but I hate to see the mountain lions die as a result.”

He considers almost all of these attacks preventable. “For me, it’s about educating owners on how to protect their animals from coyotes, mountain lions or bobcats.”

Acknowledging that “it’s hard to get people to change their behavior and spend money to build a barn or a secure cage for their animals at night,” he focuses on young people. “Educating the young when they’re at the formative stage on how to protect animals, hopefully, that’s a long-term solution.”

When asked what fascinates him the most about the charismatic cougars, he raves about their resilience.

“Despite dramatic persecution, they have been the most successful of the big carnivores to persist,” he says, with awe in his raspy voice. “You just have to admire their ability to continue to exist against all odds.”