On Thursday, researchers from UC Santa Cruz published their findings from tracking mountain lions in the Santa Cruz Mountains, entitled "Scale Dependent Behavioral Responses to Human Development by a Large Predator, the Puma."

Their data from 2008 through 2011 has shed some new light on how lions manage to survive on the outskirts of the San Francisco bay area — one of the largest metropolitan regions in the country.

Chris Wilmers and his research team captured and began . . .

California Department of Fish and Wildlife is transporting a tranquilized mountain lion from a backyard in Santa Barbara to a nearby natural area in the Los Padres National Forest.

The home on Apple Grove Circle where the lion was sighted early the morning of Monday, January 7, 2013, is immediately adjacent to a large golf course that is connected by several small greenbelts to the Los Padres National Forest just a mile and a half to the north.

On a recent walk through the Oregon capitol, Rob Klavins notes "just how far we haven't come" in the last 170 years. Outdated anti-predator views from the early wild west still dominate the wildlife policy making process. Rather than focusing resources on public education or safety, legislators are allowing the state to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to shoot coyotes from helicopters, reauthorize illegal inhumane hunting practices, and kill federally protected species. Our society is more intelligent than this, or at least shouldn't we be able to find better things to do with our time?

Despite cougar biologist John Laundre's recent study demonstrating abundant available mountain lion habitat in the 6-million acre Adirondack Park of upstate New York, the state Department of Environmental Conservation refuses to acknowledge it. For whatever reason, the agency continues to promote outdated opinions that lions are incapable of reestablishing populations in the eastern United States.

In June 2012, the possibility of mountain lions returning to the Midwest - and ultimately to other states along the eastern seaboard - was heralded in newspapers across the country. Headline after headline welcomed the return of mountain lions to places where they have not been seen for many decades. How did this come to pass? Is the trend real and sustainable? How was the news received by local policy makers? To address some of these critical questions, the Mountain Lion Foundation reviewed three recent research projects..

Program manager Phil Carter discusses the difficulties Animal Protection of New Mexico faces while trying to protect lions in New Mexico.