Desert Lion Home Ranges

Talk about Cougar Hunting with Dogs
Rowdy Fitz
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Desert Lion Home Ranges

Postby Rowdy Fitz » Sat Jan 16, 2021 4:35 am

A buddy and I were having a conversation about lion’s home ranges. We talked about Brett’s podcasts and how someone said desert lions have larger ranges than timber country lions. We hunted a 12 square mile area for 3 days. We hunted 3 sides and rhode under the other side on our way out at dark hoping to wind one. It was great looking cat country, with quite a few deer. We found tracks from a large tom and a female but they were a week old or more. I know this because they had been rained on and it’s been that long since the last rain. We couldn’t find fresh sign from either.
How large of an area have you found a lion will have?
Dan V
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Re: Desert Lion Home Ranges

Postby Dan V » Sun Jan 17, 2021 6:09 pm

Several years ago I was helping F&G with a female lion. She had been caught in a bobcat trap, they released her with a GPS collar. Fast forward a year or two, the battery was going to go dead and they wanted to catch her and get their collar back.

Anyway, the biologist sent me a map showing everywhere she had been for one year. The collar would turn on in the evening and put a blue dot on the map, every two hours it would put another blue dot until the collar went to sleep in the morning.

The map showed she lived in a little over 2 townships, or a little over 72 square miles (each township being 36 square miles, 6 miles x 6 miles).

I don’t know if this is average, big or small, but that’s what she did. There were several clusters of blue dots where she made kills or was holed up with kittens. You could also see where she traveled in a pretty straight line at night going approximately 6-8 miles in a night. It was the closest thing I could get to a lion grabbing me by the scruff of my neck and saying “hey dummy
This is what I do!”

I don’t know if your local wildlife biologist will share collar data with you, but it would be worth checking
Rowdy Fitz
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Re: Desert Lion Home Ranges

Postby Rowdy Fitz » Sun Jan 17, 2021 6:58 pm

That’s impressive, thank you for sharing!

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