A young male mountain lion was killed crossing I-69E/U.S. 77 overnight last weekend, the fourth confirmed lion found in the Valley in the past 15 years.
Texas Game Wardens responded to the report of a dead mountain lion Saturday morning in the median just south of Sebastian in Willacy County near the floodway, state officials said.
“It was a young, we call it a juvenile male, which means it’s less than two years old,” Tony Henehan, a wildlife biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, said Tuesday.
“A mountain lion at that age is dispersing from its home range, where it was born,” he added. “We have no idea where that was because it could be up to 300 miles away from where we found it, so really it could be from anywhere.”
To find enough to eat, whether a meal of white-tailed deer, feral hogs, javelina, rabbits, rodents or birds, mountain lions require huge ranges in which to operate, up to 370 square miles.
But they do work their way up and down the Rio Grande Valley on occasion, using natural corridors like the Arroyo Colorado in an attempt to avoid interacting with humans, confrontations which are almost always detrimental to the lion.
“In actual urbanized parts of the Valley, those avenues are very small or very few and far between, because they need patches of habitat, they don’t like crossing actual human structures or even roads for the most part, unless they’re really quiet roads,” Henehan said. “So they’re going to use things like riverways, patches that have actual habitat that they can move through quietly and unseen.
“They’re not going to like to move through a big open agricultural field, for instance,” he added. “They’re looking for those areas that have patches of brush or other vegetation that they can move through quietly and relatively quickly.”
Mountain lions at one time in the past 150 years were practically extirpated as livestock predators east of the Rocky Mountains, although they have recovered to an estimated U.S. population of 30,000 today.
Credible mountain lion sightings have been made in at least a dozen Midwestern states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as Arkansas and Louisiana. Florida, of course, has a small remnant population in the Everglades.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department says the big cats are found throughout the Trans-Pecos area, as well as the brush lands of South Texas and portions of the Hill Country. State biologists say mountain lions now occur in more counties than they did 15 years ago and are expanding their range west to east.
The question for many Valley residents is, are there any more of them?
“I wouldn’t go as far as to say we don’t have any native lions throughout Cameron, Hidalgo, Willacy and Starr counties, but I think the numbers are just so low, they need to cover huge distances to find enough prey to sustain themselves, and we just can’t sustain an actual population of mountain lions,” Henehan said.
“We probably have a handful of lions throughout those counties that are moving through,” he added. “However when you really think about it, how many dead mountain lions have we found here in the Valley? Very, Very few. I’ve been here six years and this is the first I’ve had hands on, or even heard of.”
As far as human residents of the Rio Grande Valley go, Henehan says mountain lions pose very little threat, and are no reason not to enjoy the outdoors.
“When they do see humans, for the most part they’re going to avoid us,” he said. “They don’t want to deal with us. All those things together, I would not be concerned about mountain lions in the Valley.”
