Cougars aiding drivers: Study shows big cats keep deer away from roads

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KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the Record.

I'm Michael Dunn. A couple of times I've had the very unfortunate occurrence of slamming into a deer while driving. If it's never happened to you, you're lucky. And if it has, then you know how frightening and shocking it can be. And in a state like Oregon, these car versus deer collisions are both costly and very dangerous for drivers. Well, a new study points to perhaps an unlikely hero in reducing these collisions between people and deer. And it's a hero very few of us want to meet in person. It's a mountain lion. Today on the show, you'll hear from one of the authors of a scientific study that shows that the presence of mountain lions near roadways causes deer to move on to safer territory, thus reducing collisions. It's the story of a big carnivore doing humans a big favor, and it's next on Oregon on the Record. Justin Siraci, who is a senior scientist and director of wildlife conservation science with Conservation Science Partners. Justin, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.

Yeah, thank you, Michael, for having me.

Yeah, let's start with this. Explain what Conservation Science Partners does. What do you guys do?

Sure. So we are a research-based nonprofit. We're headquartered in Truckee, California, but have projects sort of across the US and globally at this point. It's a bunch of ecologists and data scientists who we tend to partner with other nonprofits, with government agencies, with other players and practitioners in the conservation space to provide the analytical support for whatever wildlife management or conservation policy objectives they might be trying to have unfold.

Okay, okay. And so I'm familiar with the organization Panthera. Have you kind of worked with them on the project we're going to be talking about?

Yeah, exactly. And this long-running puma study in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington is actually Panthera's project. So Dr. Mark Elbrock is the lead of this Olympic Peninsula cougar study or puma study. And they've been working with actually several tribal nations in the region, six Native American and American Indian tribes, studying puma and prey habitat and movement for the past, I think, over... 10 years at this point. And so we just came in, Conservation Science Partners has come in somewhat more recently over the last, I guess, three or four years that Mark and I have been collaborating to, again, provide some of that analytical support, help them derive some hopefully useful inference from all this puma collar and wildlife camera trap data that they've been collecting in the region.

Okay. Before we get to the study and its findings, I kind of wanted to ask, and And maybe it's too large an area to make any kind of general assumptions. But roughly speaking, how healthy is the puma or cougar population in the Pacific Northwest, in Washington and Oregon?

Yeah, that's a great question. And one that I feel like Mark would probably be. I've never had a chance to talk to him, but I think that Puma populations in Western North America in general, I mean, it's, it's a little bit spotty, right? So like they, they have persisted. Pumas have persisted in Western North