CALIFORNIA FISH AND GAME 271 



for over a week, during which time it lived on the one deer that it had 

 been able to kill. 



At Lynchburg, Placer County, on July 19, 1920, the writer and 

 State Lion Hunter Bruce found a spotted fawn, which we judged to 

 be about three weeks of age, that had just been killed and partly eaten 

 by a one-third grown mountain lion kitten. The vegetation where the 

 fawn lay showed that there had been quite a struggle before the kitten 

 had been able to kill the fawn. When I went back to photograph this 

 dead fawn the following day, I found that a large black bear had dis- 

 covered it during the night and had ' ' cleaned up ' ' the fawn carcass. 



This brings out an important point which is often overlooked. I 

 have found that the deer eaten by both bears and coyotes have in many 

 instances really been killed by mountain lions. The fact that deer hair 

 or other remains of deer are found in feces of bears and coyotes is there- 

 fore not conclusive evidence of guilt, since both bears and coyotes are 

 notorious scavengers. My experience, extending over thirty years 

 in California, indicates that only about one-third of the deer eaten by 

 the black bear and the coyote are really killed by these predators. 

 This point was strikingly illustrated on January 15, 1921, on the south 

 side of Pilot Ridge in Mariposa County, when the writer and J. Bruce 

 found the remains of a deer that had recently been killed and partly 

 devoured by a mountain lion. This deer had been struck down by a 

 lion while it was feeding in seeming security on an open slope. The 

 lion had then dragged the deer forty feet down the hill to the shelter of 

 a buck brush bush, where the lion ate his fill. Tracks in the soft earth 

 showed that after the lion had left, a coyote had located the ''kill" and 

 had proceeded to clean up the remains of the carcass (see Fig. 104). I 

 tracked this coyote, a large female, down the trail to a goat camp where 

 it had been shot. I personally examined the stomach of this coyote and 

 found that its contents consisted entirely of the hair, meat and bones of 

 a deer. Had I not examined the condition and the source of this 

 coyote's meal, I would have naturally supposed that it had killed a deer. 



MOUNTAIN LION 



From a study of the lion skins which have been presented for 

 bounty, and from field work covering all sections of the State over a 

 period of years, I have come to the conclusion that the adult mountain 

 lion population in California in 1932 was about 600 individuals. Rec- 

 ords show that about 42 per cent of the lion hides that have been pre- 

 sented for bounty have been those of females. This is rather surprising 

 since the present bounty is $30 on females and only $20 on males. 

 However, it should be stated that the $20 is paid in all cases in which 

 there is any question or doubt of the sex of the animal, and since care- 

 less skinning often destroys the evidence of sex on the pelt, there is an 

 understandable loss in the number of females reported. 



A careful check on the numerous spotted mountain lion kittens by 

 State Lion Hunter Bruce has shown that at birth the male kittens are 

 only slightly more numerous than females. 



If we place the number of breeding females at 300 we will not be 

 far from the facts. Under normal conditions, female cougars breed 

 every other year and the average number of young in a litter has been 

 found by the writer to be 2.3 kittens. The annual crop of mountain 



