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I found a lion last weekend,a large cat i think a male by the size but until u get closer u never know.but what i am wondering is how far u guys think he will travel in his home range,the food is plentiful. I have to wait until sept 1.do u think he will be in the area still.

Home ranges vary a bit from area to area with prey being the deciding factor. 50 square miles is the average for toms. If cat desities are high that will shrink as long as prey is abundent. For the females it's around 20 square miles.

If your cat is not just traveling thru looking for a territory he should be around in Sept. Now would be the time to try to find scratches & toilets, it will make it easyer to find him in that 50 square miles when the season opens. Good luck to you and your dogs.

Hard to say, summer range isn't always the same as winter range. Follow the deer, he will.

Excellent advice Robin and Dean!

I am not sure what part of the province you are in, but if you find those signs that Robin is eluding to then you stand a good chance of getting to know this one face to face.


short story:
I had a guy tell me about a big tom track he had found on a road and the lion had been dragging deer carcass across it. he told me he went down and found where the lion had left the deer after he ate on it. Well it was four days before i could get away and get out there but i got there shortly after daylight and we saddled up and cut a bunch of dogs loose and rode over there. Well we could still see the track becasue the old tom was really digging in carrying most of that deer, but some of it was dragging and leaving a trail of hair, thru therocks and weeds and such. Well the dogs took off on the drag mar and we found them poking around the remains of this doe. She was pretty well all eaten up and exposed and the birds had already been on it. Well I figured the lion had left out, but I thought my old dogs would find a cold trail leaving and we would go to work on it. Well they poked around bawled a bit here and there and just never got much scent at all it seemed. Well i figured this old lion maybe made two feeds and had been gone a couple of days . We rode around and hunted and never got a bark anyplace else. i figured that old rascal had just sold out of the country and wAS JUST PASSING THRU AND THIS WAS FAST FOOD. . Well about noon we stopped in a little rocky header with a few big pines in it and decided we would eat some lunch and then think about getting out of there and going home. Well we were eating a sandwich and talking and the dogs were louging around hoping for some crumbs, and I noticed one old dog was missing. I asked Scott you seen old Gunner? he said yes he was here just a few minutes ago. I looked around and I saw him down in the rocks below us just poking around maybe looking for a cooler place to lay up. All of a sudden he let out a roar like the devil himslef and the next thing I knew he went running out of there hot on the heels of a big old long tailed lion. Well the other dogs ran to him but the cat was already up a tree looking down. That old lion had ate his fill and went in there and just laid up for several days and night and never really moved, and if that dog had not got right on top of him we would have rode off and thought all the while he had left the country. So lions can make them selves pretty scarce at times and still be right under your nose.

Speaking of under your nose. I hate to admit it, but last season I spent five days in a row, leaving the house in the dark and coming back in the dark. On day 6, I took a day off to get some things around the house taken care of. After the sun came up I noticed a flock of magpies beside the driveway. I went to see what they were up to and discovered that a lion had a deer stashed not 50 feet from my driveway! Imagine what I felt like knowing that I had been driving past a fresh kill for 5 days in a row.

i have been told by a good friend that hunts in montana for lions. that a lion will usaul cross over his tracks about every 7 days. but if food moves than they move to. if u run them with dogs i think he said they will change there path of travel.

alex

we have seen a few cats (collared cats) with huge home ranges. both cats had a ton of recorded data on them and were both in their prime mature age. both were in the mid 180 pound range.but we do not really have winter or summer grounds. they had a similiar area for there home range all year. lions, expecially males home ranges are allways changing. for example if you have two mature toms, lets say one north and one south of each other and the north one gets killed, the southern cat will expand north. but another cat can come in and push the southern cat farther south than he was in the first place. their home ranges are allways shifting and moving around.

Mel
I was talking to a friend who hunts for the state of Nevada a couple months back. He told me about a couple damage cats he got that were wearing collars from another state. They were the type that record waypoints. They were a lot of miles from where they had been collared.

Hope to visit with him after he finds out the details of the cats travels. If I remember right one was a tom & the other a young female.

The cats can really move when they decide to. In the winter here we will often find the same cat in the same canyon all winter...less than five square mile 'home range'. In the summer without snow it's tough to know where those cats are...likely in that same canyon. They're going to be where the deer are, even if their densities are higher than they might prefer.

I think the home range and cat density is entirely dependant on the prey availability Here in WA the WDFW has decided to use an average on the collared cats to determine average home range for the state and make a population estimate...the problem is the info they used was from a dry area that has mule deer as the base prey(thus a wider 'home range' and less prey/cover). Where I live we have WT deer (LOTS OF THEM) and more forest cover. To me (professional wildlife biologist btw) it seems like the model is completely out of line for the majority of the state, but the WDFW used this data to cut our lion quota by 40% this season...total bs and clearly within the anti hunting agenda.

YEARS PAST PRIOR TO THE OREGON BAN. (STILL HURTS) I CHECKED IN A LION HARVESTED BY A HUNTER. AT LE GRANDE OR. ODFW. BIOLOGIST WAS COMMENTING ON A STUDY CAT THAT VANISHED FROM THE CATHERINE CR. UNIT THAT WAS RADIO COLLARED. THIS AREA IS N.E. OF LE GRANDE IN THE WALLOWA MTNS. SOME TIME HAD PASSED BEFORE THE MYSTERY WAS SOLVED. SEEMS THIS YOUNG JUVENILE CAT PULLED OUT IN SEARCH OF A HOME RANGE AND WAS HARVESTED SOME 500 TRAVEL MILES TO THE NORTH IN THE SALMON RIVER DRAINAGE IN IDAHO. THERE WAS 33 LION COLLARED IN THIS AREA AT THE TIME HE LEFT. IN THE WINTER THEY WERE PILED UP TIGHT WITH THE DEER IN THE SUMMER YOU WOULD HARDLY KNOW THEY EXHIST AS THEY WERE SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE VAST WILDERNESS AREAS.

Mike
I got to work a little on the Cathern Cr. study with Ted Craddock. Your shore right about the crowding in the winter. The area right behind Mt Harris had 9 cats within a few miles on one overflight. Of course 1500 head of elk may have played a part in that crowding

One female from that study wearing a collar took up residence over by Ukiah Or. She had 3 kittens the first winter. I made all the leather connectors on the collars for that study. They had to be a certain thickness and had a knife score across them so they'd break loose in time.

For me, the studys give me more questions than anything. Ted has a picture of the largest tom in the study on his wall. They named him Humpy and he weighed in the high 180's when they first collared him.

R severe, the study that i am on also uses gps collars so you can pretty much tell where they are and have been all the time.i have also collared cats in western WA that ended up in eastern Wa and cats that i caught in eastern WA ended up by my house in western WA.so you never know where they will end up. expecially sub-adult males.

buddy has a pic of a young collared Tom treed north of kamloops BC...best the officials could figure it was collared in washington state...thats a hell of a long way away.

HORSHUR. WHEN I TRAVEL TO B.C AND TALK TO THE GUIDES, THEY SAY THERE LIONS ARE GETTING HARVESTED ACROSS THE BORDER IN WASHINGTON. I DON'T WANT A FIGHT ON THIS SUBJECT JUST STATING WHAT HAS BEEN TOLD TO ME.A LION FROM WASHINGTON TO CAMLOOPS WOW THAT IS TRAVELING. WONDER IF THE CANADIANS MADE IT PAT TO TRAVEL THE TOLL HIGHWAY. LOL.

R. SEVERE. HOWDY. HEY BEING FROM PENDLETON AREA , HAVE YOU BEEN IN THE WENAHA UNIT WITH TED. WHAT A GREAT GUY AND A TOUGH DOG MAN. THAT UNIT IS FULL OF LIONS AS WELL THE OLD UMATILLA TRAPPER K.M. USED TO WORK THE COUNTY. HE STILL GOING? TO BE IN ON THOSE LION STUDIES IS HISTORY IN THE MAKING. WHAT AN EXPERIENCE. SOMETIMES IT IS JUST TOO SCIENTIFIC FOR AN OLD DOG HUNTER TO GRASP. WHEN I LIVED IN WALLOWA YEARS BACK I GOT IN WITH MERLE HAWKINS HIS FATHER IN-LAW WAS RED HIGGINS OF REDS HORSE RANCH . GOT TO KNOW THAT CATHERINE CR. AND ALL THE N.E. UNITS WELL. NOTHING SHORT OF PARADISE.