In September, La Plata County Search and Rescue and Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials helped extract a Texas family from the Purgatory Flats area after they encountered two mountain lions.
In the widely reported incident, a Flight For Life crew carried Will and Rylea Sadler and their infant to the Gelande parking lot at Purgatory Resort after they feared they were being stalked by the mountain lions.
According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, mountain lion sightings have increased in Southwest Colorado this year, up more than 50% in Area 15, which covers La Plata, Montezuma, San Juan and parts of Dolores, Hinsdale and Mineral counties.
With recent encounters and the rise in sightings, it would be easy to assume the mountain lion population in Southwest Colorado is increasing.
But according to CPW spokesman John Livingston, wildlife managers don’t have any information suggesting the mountain lion population is increasing.
The population is “doing well and thriving,” Livingston said.
CPW is in part attributing the increase in sightings to the growth of technology and the doorbell and wildlife cameras that have exploded in popularity.
“The easy answer is (home cameras) run 24/7 and they’re recording everything that walks by, day or night,” said Steve McClung, assistant area wildlife manager for CPW’s Area 15 in Durango.
“It just creates that opportunity for these cameras to pick stuff up when we normally wouldn’t be out there seeing it firsthand,” McClung said.
Technavio, a technology research company, projects the global smart doorbell camera market will grow by $3.27 billion from 2021 to 2025. Ring, one of the leading home camera companies, is estimated to have sold almost 400,000 security devices in December 2019 alone.
But it’s not just doorbell cameras. More and more people are buying trail cameras for both security and to monitor wildlife near their homes. The trail camera market is also projected to grow by about 40% over the next five years, according to Grand View Research, a U.S. and India-based market research company.
The proliferation of camera technology is changing how people interact with wildlife.
Remote camera technology that can be accessed from a phone or a laptop makes wildlife present in a way that it has never been before.
“For some, it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. I saw a (mountain) lion, bucket list item checked,” McClung said. “In others, it engenders some level of fear.”
McClung said out-of-state residents with second homes in Durango have called CPW from distant airports to report animals that appear on their home cameras.
According to Livingston, about one-fifth of the mountain lion sightings in Area 15 in 2020 were from doorbell or game cameras.
It’s not only mountain lions. Across Colorado, bears, moose and other animals are frequently caught on video.
“Now (bears are) showing up on camera and some people are thinking, ‘That shows that there’s more bears,’” said Bryan Peterson, executive director of Bear Smart Durango. “We’re just seeing them more because of the new technology.”
Home cameras can also reinforce people’s perceptions of different animals. Bears become commonplace nuisances while mountain lions remain stealthy and secretive.
“Now that bears are pretty routinely seen, it’s not the novelty,” McClung said. “I’m sure they’re getting picked up on these cameras. We do get those pictures. But they don’t create the buzz.”
Luke Schafer, West Slope director for Conservation Colorado, said incidents like the one in September and growing camera technology create a narrative that mountain lions are dangerous and everywhere.
“That’s just not the reality of the situation,” Schafer said.
The effects of emerging technology on wildlife are far reaching. A 2020 study published in the journal Human-Wildlife Interactions found that people who regularly use smartphone cameras are more comfortable standing closer to wildlife, at potentially harmful distances, than those who never use smartphone cameras.
“These (technologies) are all double-edged,” said Gary Skiba, wildlife manager at San Juan Citizens Alliance, a Durango- and Farmington-based environmental nonprofit.
“We tend to think of things simplistically and almost everything is pretty complicated,” Skiba said.
Though some emerging technologies are having an impact on wildlife that researchers are only beginning to study and understand, other technologies have helped conservation efforts for decades.
Wildlife managers and researchers have used trail cameras, GPS collars and radio-tracking to better understand the movements of animals and protect their habitat.
“It used to be you had to go up in a plane and fly around and pick up a signal to go find the animals that you collared,” McClung said. “Now you can get (collars) with GPS and devices that will send you a ping of (an animal’s) location every hour on the hour.”
New tracking technology has even allowed CPW researchers to track the tiny New Mexico meadow jumping mouse, McClung said.
“As the technology improves, it allows us to do more and get more data,” McClung said. “It helps us to inform decisions whether it’s herd sizes or migration patterns or where to place wildlife crossing structures. It can be very helpful in informing how we manage these animals on the landscape.”
ahannon@durangoherald.com
