January 9, 2004 Two female mountain bikers were attacked by a cougar Thursday afternoon in Orange County’s Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park. A third presumed victim was found dead and half-buried nearby.
Cyclists Debi Nicholls and Anne Hjelle were riding in the popular wilderness park when the cougar pounced on them. Hjelle was dragged into the bushes by her head while Nicholls hung onto her legs and other rescuers, alerted by the women's screams, pelted the cat with rocks.
"It was a tug-of-war between the mountain lion trying to drag her down the ravine by her face" and Nicholls "who had her by the legs," Mike Castellano, one of the rescuers, told the Los Angeles Times.
Another witness described seeing the cougar’s mouth wrapped entirely around Hjelle’s head. While hanging on to her friend’s legs, Nicholls tried to offer reassurance saying she wouldn’t let go.
Hjelle was taken to the Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, where doctors first listed her condition as critical but later upgraded it to serious.
Later in the day, the Orange County Sheriff’s department shot and killed a two-year-old, 110-pound male cougar at the site of the attack. About fifty yards away, they found the half-buried body of 35-year-old Mark Jeffrey Reynolds. If Reynolds’s death is confirmed as a mountain lion kill, it would be the first in the U.S. since 1994.
According to wildlife experts, lions commonly bury their prey and stay nearby to guard it. It is unclear whether the cougar attacked the women to protect its earlier kill.
Jim Amormino, spokesperson for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, says that trappers are currently searching for cougars in Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park, with orders to shoot on sight any they see until the problem cat(s) have been positively identified. There are no current plans to rid the park of cougars once the killer has been found.
David Baron, a cougar expert and visiting scholar at Boston University, is distressed about the incident: "God this is horrible…exactly what I’ve been predicting," he told the Los Angeles Times. "As the cats adapt to suburban life, mountain lion attacks, while still very rare, are much more common than they were 10 or 15 years ago."
Thursday’s incident brings the total number of attacks in California to 13, including five fatalities, over the last 114 years according to California State Fish and Game biologist, Doug Updike.
In "Stalker," a May 2003 Outside feature, Elwood Reid reported on the surprising resurgence of cougar populations in the United States. While the big cats were nearly extirpated at the beginning of the last century, more recent federal protection and the animals’ adaptability to suburban life have sparked a turnaround.
In his new book, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, naturalist David Quammen points out that predation of humans is hardly breaking news. "Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat," he writes.
Maurice Hornocker, the wildlife biologist who did the first cougar studies in the 1960’s, paints a pithy picture of the current situation: "more people, more cats—more opportunities to come together."
