MCLEOD — According to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, mountain lions are thriving once again in the state, and one woman had an up-close encounter with the animal earlier this month that left her grateful she was inside her home on East Boulder Road south of Big Timber.
Eileen Ewan looked out her kitchen window one night and noticed an animal approaching her home.
“I thought, surely when it sees me, it'll turn around. But it didn't, it kept going,” Ewan said recently. "It was pretty exciting, especially since it just stood there and looked at the camera."
Looking back at her was a mountain lion. She and her husband had seen mountain lion activity before, but this experience was a first. Ewan said they're not always looking for a mountain lion, but they always know that the animal is there.
“We had one kill a deer and drag it into one of our barns,” Ewan said. "We've been trying to scare the deer away because we thought that maybe that would keep the mountain lion away, too."
According to Brian Wakeling, the game management bureau chief for Montana FWP, tracking the mountain lion population in the state is a complex task.
"Mountain lions occupy huge landscapes, they travel a lot, they have large home ranges, and so it's not at all uncommon for them, especially in places where prey populations may not be as abundant for them to cover an awful lot of land," Wakeling said. "Part of our monitoring has been to establish what we call eco-regions, which are areas of the state that are fairly similar as far as habitat quality and wildlife abundance, things that they may prey on."
Wakeling said mountain lions are most abundant in the northwest and west central part of the state.
"What we've seen in Montana over the past, probably since 1998, 1998 was probably about our low point as far as our mountain lion populations based on our best available models that we have," Wakeling said. "We saw an increase in that population since that time, until probably about 2012, and probably since that time, it's probably been at a, from a statewide level, at a stable to slightly increasing level."
In 2023, an FWP commission voted to start reducing the mountain lion population.
"The direction that the commission provided in 2023 was to try to achieve a reduction in mountain lion populations and that varied in some units, you know, as low as 10% in some areas of 40%," Wakeling said. "The objective was to do that over a six-year period of time. It wasn't to, you know, cut the population in half in a year. And so, that allows us the ability to continue to monitor the population and provide alternate recommendations through the course of time."
He believes the agency has seen a reduction, but he admits it is difficult to track as the animal can travel large distances.
Wakeling also said the number of mountain lions in the state isn't what drives conflicts with humans.
"If there is an attractant that will bring an animal in, that is oftentimes the kind of thing that increases conflict," he said. "We have landscaping that's attractive to a lot of prey species. When we get those animals moving in, deer moving into Helena or Billings or wherever, a lot of times the predators will follow them in."
