Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader
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Wednesday, April 6, 2011 • A 11
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Sunfield Waldorf School Now Enrolling Pre-K – 8th WALK THROUGH THE GRADES
Visit our grades classrooms (combined 1/2, 3/4, 5/6 and 7/8) April 12 or May 10 • 9 – 10 am
PARENTING WITH HEART AND SOUL – THE WONDER OF EARLY CHILDHOOD
April 16 • 10 – 12 pm Join us with your child for a puppet story and circle time, followed by an open forum discussion. Childcare provided. Please RSVP • 111 Sunfield Lane, Port Hadlock (Located off Rhody Drive between Circle & Square and Fiesta Jalisco) 385-3658 or school@sunfieldfarm.org • www.sunfieldfarm.org
Andy Palmer Memorial Scholarship
Andy’s scholarship has been established to recognize the personal characteristics of kindness, loyalty, integrity and humility. Andy’s life was full of friends who treasure the special way he touched their hearts and their lives, and his life is commemorated by this scholarship. The award will be made to a graduating senior who has consistently exemplified the personal characterists as practiced by Andy Palmer during his life and his efforts at encouraging a culture of kindness.
After killing livestock such as goats, cougars typically remain within 100 yards of the kill so as not to lose their meal to another predator, said Sgt. Phillip Henry of the state Department of Fish & Wildlife. Henry came across two cougars in trees directly above a goat kill in south Jefferson County in October 2010.
Cougar complaints are on the rise Agent says ban on hounds is having impact on cat population By Nicholas Johnson of the Leader
The recipient will be selected through a letter of nomination process. The letters should not only specify the characteristics that make the candidate deserving of the award but also cite specific examples of how the student has consistently demonstrated an effort to create and support a culture of kindness, loyalty, integrity and humility at school and in the community. Letters should be succinct but adequately describe the candidate’s qualifications. Any non-related individual such as school faculty or support staff member, employer, scoutmaster, neighbor, or other community person may submit a nomination. The Recipient must be planning to enroll in a post high school education or training program. Two scholarships will be awarded: one for a student in the Port Angeles School District and one from the Port Townsend District.
NOMINATION DEADLINE IS MAY 2, 2011 Please submit completed nominations to: Counselor’s Office, Port Townsend High School 1500 Van Ness St., Port Townsend, WA 98368
— 2009 Scholarship Recipient: Quinton Decker — — 2010 Scholarship Recipient: Brett Johnson —
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A cougar reportedly killed a goat at a residence along Jacob Miller Road on March 21, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. If so, it is the latest in a growing number of cougar attacks and sightings in the lowland areas of East Jefferson County. Over the past year, cougar complaints and killings have grown beyond the norm. Yet Sgt. Phillip Henry of the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, who has overseen Jefferson and Clallam counties for the past 23 years, said the recent uptick is partially cyclic and partially a result of heavy state regulation of wildlife management. Henry said he has received roughly 40 complaints over the last year, resulting in the killing (Henry calls it “harvesting”) of approximately seven cougars. Most the incidents in Jefferson County are centered around Quilcene, he said. And even though the numbers are up, Henry said there’s no need to fear more for the safety of children or livestock than before. “These cats are in close proximity to children, but we’ve had no incidents of them taking a kid from a school bus stop,” Henry said. “What we have is this spectrum of people who will call if they hear a tapping on their window. We have to mark it down as an unfounded sighting. Then we have people playing golf in Port Ludlow who see cougars crossing the fairway on a regular basis, and we never get a call from them. So we get some people who are not calling because it’s so commonplace, and we get some who call in because they’re paranoid.” If Henry or other agents are to have a chance of catching a cougar, reports must be timely and weather conditions must be conducive to preserving tracks. A dead or missing small animal – house cats, chickens, geese or other pets – might have been the victim of some other animal, such as dogs, raccoons and bobcats, he said. “If it’s just a sighting, we’re not going to respond to that,” he said. “The cougar has a right to be here, and as long as it’s just doing cougar stuff, there’s just too many for us to worry about.”
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Cougar complaints and killings last spiked on the North Olympic Peninsula around 1994, Henry said. And since then, the number of complaints hasn’t fallen. He said his predecessor, who oversaw the North Olympic Peninsula region from 1964 to 1994, received as few as three cougar complaints in his career. Since Henry took over in 1994, he said he has received between 300 and 400 complaints. During the 1980s and early ’90s, the state tried to regulate cougar hunting by requiring the purchase of a tag. Yet most hunters would not buy the tag up front. Instead, if a hunter saw a cougar while looking for deer or elk, that hunter would
shoot it and buy the tag afterward. As a result, the state’s data showed about a 75 percent success rate, Sgt. Phil Henry meaning of those tags sold, about three-fourths came back attached to a dead cougar. Henry said if those hunters had purchased tags prior to shooting the cats, a success rate of 0.25 would have been more likely. In order to fix the skewed data, Henry said, the state shifted to a permit system in 1994 that required hunters to apply beforehand. There was a limited number of permits sold. Some environmental activist groups started applying for the permits, thus preventing hunters from obtaining them. Despite that, hunters with the highest success rates – somewhere between 50 and 70 percent – were those using hounds. Hounds have been specially bred for generations to be effective trackers of cougars. “If a [regular] hunter were to get a cougar tag every year, they would likely go their entire life without seeing a cougar,” Henry said.
HOUND HUNTING BANNED
In 1996, a voter-generated initiative banned hunting cougars with hounds. Henry said the law is reckless and disregards efforts to manage cougar populations. “I think it is really bad government to try to manage Fish & Wildlife based on voter initiatives,” he said. “Basically, it takes away the biological and sociological components of trying to manage a resource when you make it a political thing.” One result, he said, may be an expansion of the cougar population. He said the department’s goal is to create homeostasis, or a balance of the natural boom and bust. He said cougar populations are kept from reaching extreme highs and lows through the use of regulated hunting seasons. Since the initiative was passed, cougar populations have risen, and so have complaints. “The irony is, the state used to get revenue from hunters buying licenses to go out and harvest this population that we are now paying state tax dollars to harvest the same number of animals,” he said. “It’s crazy. Rather than get revenue, we are having to pay people to do the same thing.”
DECLINING RESOURCES
Henry said the department simply doesn’t have the resources to manage the cougar population, only to respond and kill those animals determined to be problem cats. When it’s time to investigate a livestock killing, Henry is sure to contract with one of the few remaining hound hunters in the region. Most hound hunters have left the state because of the 1996 ban. “I would say of all the cougars that are harvested
“While we were looking at these two cats that were almost directly above the pen, the dogs treed one about 50 yards up the creek. So we had three cats within 50 yards of the kill.” Sgt. Phil Henry wildlife agent throughout a year, 99 percent are harvested with the use of hounds,” in the supervised pursuit of a problem cat, he said.
WORKING IN THREES
Henry said that last year, for the first time, he came across a livestock kill involving three cougars – an unusual situation, because cougars tend to be territorial, lone hunters. In October 2010, he investigated the killing of three goats in a pen along Thorndyke Road in the south end of the county. Expecting to find one cougar, he brought a hound hunter along and before too long the dogs were running around the site disoriented. “I don’t know how to explain it, but you could smell the cougar,” he said. Soon the hound hunter noticed one cougar on a branch just above the pen. Then he noticed another. “While we were looking at these two cats that were almost directly above the pen, the dogs treed one about 50 yards up the creek,” he said. “So we had three cats within 50 yards of the kill.” Henry said if cougars leave a kill site, they typically won’t travel more than 100 yards away for fear of losing their meal. “Three cats in one site is pretty rare,” he said. “It was the first in my career.” Four months prior to that incident, a fellow officer caught two cougars in the same tree after responding to a llama kill in Quilcene. And about a month and half ago, he said a trail camera near Soap Lake in central Washington caught eight cougars sharing one kill. Incidents such as these suggest to Henry an increase in pack mentality as cougar populations rise and territory dwindles. Legislation currently sitting in the Washington State Senate proposes a five-year extension of a pilot program begun in 2004 and extended several times. The program allows counties with a high level of cougar interaction and harvesting in a year – at least 11 interactions and four pet or livestock killings – to make use of hound hunters during the winter months. Although Jefferson County may exceed the required level, it has never been one of the counties involved in the program. Call the Department of Fish & Wildlife at 877-9339847 to report a cougar.