The cougar's last stand

Deep in the Santa Monica mountains, her exact whereabouts known only to biologists tracking her by GPS, the puma gave birth a year ago to four kittens. Two males and two females, their newborn eyes and ears sealed shut, their tiny bodies making swimming motions against the lapping of their mother's rough tongue. It was a solitary act by a secretive animal in a wilderness her species has roamed for thousands of years.

Six weeks later, the cubs were media stars. Photo ops and stories by the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily News and ABC 7 News put them squarely in the public eye.

"Last known Santa Monica Mountain lions become parents"

Images of a National Park Service worker cradling a 6-week-old cub, all wide blue eyes and black-spotted fur, round and clumsy as a plush toy, gave the story legs.

"It's quadruplets for the last known mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains"

The timing could not have been better. Just 10 months earlier, after an investigation showed that the cubs' father, known as Puma 1 or P1, was preying on goats, a rancher had been granted a "kill" permit by the state Department of Fish and Game. News that hunters were about to shoot the last known male lion in the Santa Monica Mountains produced a public uproar. The rancher quickly backed down and the permit expired. Now, with the death sentence lifted and a litter of cubs giving the local mountain lion population a significant boost, there was cause for exultation.

"Four lion cubs are born free"

But Ray Sauvajot, a wildlife ecologist and director of the National Park Service's 10-year-old Carnivore Project, knew better. In public, he shared his genuine joy at the litter's birth. In private, he faced the grim truth that science wouldn't let him ignore: With freeways, roads, business parks, housing developments and vineyards gobbling up their range, there isn't enough wild land left in the Santa Monica Mountains to support all six pumas.

Without a way into the wilder lands to the north, these mountain lions may be doomed. They have no one to breed with but each other. Driven by his territorial instincts, P1 could kill any one of them at any time. What appeared to be salvation from extinction was, without some luck and some quick action by humans, the beginning of a grim slide into oblivion.