Orick, Calif. — AN hour before dusk, when the redwood shadows on the popular Brown Creek hiking trail are long and dark, a mountain lion sprang from a huckleberry bush onto Jim Hamm's back, gripped his face with giant claws and tore at the back of his skull with its fangs.
Looking at the ghastly photographs a few hours later, wildlife forensics specialist Jim Banks shook his head. "Damn near scalped him," Banks muttered.
Miraculously, the 70-year-old Hamm survived, largely because of the courageous intervention of his wife, Nell, a slightly built 65-year-old who struck the mountain lion repeatedly with a heavy branch and stabbed it with a ballpoint pen until it released its hold.
After the attack, hunters summoned to the scene in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park north of Eureka had shot and killed two mountain lions. The urgent task for Banks and his colleague, geneticist Jeff Rodzen, was to determine if one of them was the attacker.
Like the popular TV crime show, Banks and Rodzen form a kind of wildlife CSI team, cracking cases in their state Department of Fish and Game forensics laboratory outside Sacramento.
In 1995, the lab became one of the first state wildlife facilities in the country to use DNA evidence to positively identify wild animals that attack humans and livestock, and to prosecute poachers.
In recent years, Banks, 69, and Rodzen, 31, have used DNA to track illegally harvested bear gallbladders and Sacramento River sturgeon caviar thieves. Having built a comprehensive DNA file on the state's deer population, their next project is to genetically map depleted red abalone populations.
In animal-attack cases, their work exonerates animals nearly as often as it convicts them.
In fact, one of the first things that worried Banks about the Jan. 24 mountain lion attack was that it would spawn a rash of false reports in other parts of California. Sometimes, he said, these are coverups for human foul play. A number of alleged bear and mountain lion attacks that Banks has investigated over the years actually turned out to be homicides.
In one 2003 incident in Trinity County, officials were ready to classify the victim as a mountain lion casualty. The man, found partly devoured on an alpine ledge, had supposedly been a hunter. But when Banks examined the scene, he noticed that the dead man was wearing tennis shoes instead of boots and had no backpack for his supplies and ammunition. The body was surrounded by bear and coyote scat, but none from a mountain lion.
