Hunt to save bighorn to begin this week

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.

Contractors for Arizona will begin hunting mountain lions this week to keep them from preying on a thinning herd of bighorn.

Bob Posey, regional supervisor with the Arizona Game and Fish Department in Kingman, said culling the mountain lion population in the Black Mountain region was the only tool left to the agency, which is trying to maintain the population of sheep in the region.

Posey said an estimated 15 mountain lions, cougars or puma, may live in the Black Mountain region of western Arizona, which includes the Arizona side of Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The area more appropriately would be home to three to five big cats, he said.

"The area that we're looking at is essentially from Lake Mead all the way south to I-40 (Interstate 40) south of Kingman, south of Bullhead City," Posey said.

The National Park Service has declined to allow hunting in the recreation area without first holding public hearings.

Posey said the state plan, in development for several years, is to target lions in areas where scientists know that bighorn are being killed. The state says the herd of bighorns is critical for repopulating the Intermountain West.

Posey suggested that the state's contract hunters could go into the federal recreation area for the mountain lions at a later time.

"I won't say we won't need to, but we definitely have other areas we can focus on, and that's what we plan to do early on ... We're at the last management option in dealing with the problem."

Lisa Belenky, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, criticized the state plan as shortsighted.

"We think it's crazy," Belenky said from her offices in San Francisco. "That's just not the way to protect species. In the long run, they need to conserve habitat, not decrease mountain lions."

Kent Turner, chief of resource management for the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, said that if the state's contractors stay out of the federal land - about 230 square miles, or a third of the Black Mountains region - the Park Service will have little to say.

"We have the same objectives that they do, for the long-term viability of all the native wildlife in the area, including the bighorn sheep and the mountain lion," Turner said.

Frank Buono, an Arizona resident, Park Service veteran and board member of the national group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said the agencies' statements contain both good and bad news. Buono and other environmentalists earlier this month had demanded public hearings before any mountain lion hunt within the recreation area.

"From a wildlife management perspective, the state's killing of lions is still questionable, but we're certainly relieved that the Park Service has shown it has the responsibility and authority to manage the lions within the recreation area," he said.