Original subtitles

This is North America's big cat

Known

as a mountain lion or a cougar They

appear powerful

Intimidating

and deadly.

But incredibly, very little has been discovered about them...

until now.

This film follows a year in the life of two amazing mountain lion families

nestled in the Rockies.

Going hot.

They are part of the most intense study ever carried out on mountain lions in

North America.

By sharing intimate moments in the secretive lives of these families and

their neighbours,

are finally revealing the true nature of North America's big cat.

Mountain lions can be found right across the western states of the USA.

Not that you'd know it.

They're wary, elusive creatures.

Ghostly figures on the landscape.

Which is why hard scientific evidence about their behavior is thin on the

ground.

It's generally been assumed that mountain lions are solitary animals and

that the only interactions between adults either result in mating or

violence.

But now those assumptions are being challenged.

Just north of Jackson, Wyoming, The scientists of Panthera's Teton Cougar

project have been carrying out the most exhaustive study ever conducted into

mountain lions in the USA.

She's here.

There. Maybe kind of get onto this first shelf and go around that way.

Under the leadership of Mark Elbrock... the team have been using the latest in

GPS technology to track mountain lions.

She's moved quite a bit, which is good. So we should get in there and set some

cameras. Sounds good.

And then record their behavior on video cameras.

They're using 13 years of data and thousands of video clips to rewrite our

understanding of mountain lion behavior.

Let's have a look at what this is.

They also hope to answer one burning question.

In our study area, the population of mountain lions has dropped by about half

in the last seven to eight years.

And our goal has really been to figure out why.

Like any big Hollywood film, the project has its stars.

Two, in fact.

The first is known as F61.

When I think of a successful mountain lion, she is the one I think of.

F61 is strong.

She's physically able.

She's the most competent hunter.

She is.

really the epitome of a successful mountain lion.

F61 currently has two one-year-old kittens, a male and

a female, who is affectionately known as Frostbite.

They're almost as big as their mother, but there's no doubt who's in charge.

Despite the kitten's size, they're still dependent on their mother.

It will be another six months before they will have learnt how to hunt and

all the skills they will need to survive on their own.

Their neighbour in the study area is the other star of the project.

F-51 Having

filmed her for several years, Mark has noticed her parenting style

is quite different.

51 does not provide for her kittens as well as 61 does.

51 is a loose

You might even say like a hippie mother.

Just providing lots of love, but not necessarily all the sustenance they

need.

Thanks to Easygoing F51, Supermum F61, and other cats,

Mark has been granted an incredible insight into the world of the mountain

lion.

He's witnessed intimate moments of mountain lions playing

Eating

together And

caching their kills

covering them up to minimize the chances of a scavenger stealing a free meal.

He's also been able to witness some truly unique moments in their lives.

In this video, we caught something incredibly rare.

Note the carcass.

F61 and F51 are about to appear.

Don't blink.

51, 61, and 61 wins and takes off.

It's just a very quick lightning speed, mountain lion speed, you might say.

They fought over the carcass and 61 ran off with it.

Amidst the thousands of videos Mark has studied, documenting dozens of

interactions,

This video is one of just four in which there is any violence.

We've come to realize by doing this research that physical contact is not

the rule, it's the exception.

Mark has many videos that record non-violent interactions.

And the first footage Mark ever captured of a meeting between two female mountain

lions is a good example.

Here comes a nine-year-old resident female.

And she comes around, she turns, and here comes a six-year-old female.

She's doing mild hissing. And in the beginning, we thought, gosh, all that

hissing, it's the pre-runner to violence.

It's super aggressive.

No hissing seems pretty normal now that we've seen it over her and over and over

again So what happened next they spent two days together and this is what they

did They shared a meal It blew me away

Having now viewed thousands of videos Mark has

concluded that most of the previously held assumptions about mountain lions

are wrong

We're beginning to describe a species that has some sort of social system that

is interacting with a frequency that challenges this idea that they are

solitary animals and It's just opening our eyes and completely turning

everything on its head on what we thought were the social lives of

mountain lions

Easygoing

f-51 has recently given birth to a new litter of kittens.

As this incredible footage reveals, for the first five weeks of life, the

kittens remain in their den, living off their mother's milk.

But their mother, F-51, will still need to hunt during this period.

So while she's several miles away, Mark and his team slip in to assess the

kittens' health.

Someone hold that one nice and tight.

We're good.

Here we go.

I hear them.

I hear kittens.

Okay.

We got one.

Okay, little buddy. It's all right. There's our first kitten.

Oh, my goodness.

Nicely done. Beautiful.

The team have limited time to work before F51 returns.

Okay. Number two.

Oh, nice. Biting pretty hard.

All right. There we go. Looks like a male to me.

Number three.

Holy mackerel.

Watch that back leg.

Coming out, even at this early age, the kittens have distinct personalities.

This guy's a loose cannon.

Whoever's holding this bag, do not let go.

He is our most lively cat to date.

All right.

We're good. Let's get some work done.

Each kitten is weighed.

This one is three and a half pounds.

That is small.

And sexed.

Then each one is fitted with a special expandable kitten sized radio collar

This is the part where you try not to get bit Only

when

the kittens are bigger will they be given a GPS version

She is online.

Each kitten is allocated a study number and an ear tag.

The number of this female is going to be 99.

That's 99.

Correct.

Monitoring kittens is a key part of the cougar project's work.

This is a critical age for kitten survivorship, and many don't even make

it to the first steps beyond the den.

But here, we'll be able to track these four kittens and see whether they

survive to disperse on their own.

The kittens' chances of making it to adulthood are not good.

Wolves were recently reintroduced into this area of Wyoming.

Not only do they compete for available prey like elk and deer, but wolf packs

will often chase a mountain lion off a kill.

Worse still, they will kill any kittens they come across.

Mountain lions are also threatened by humans.

They can legally be hunted at this time of year, and being collared and clearly

part of a scientific study offers no protection.

Even the weather poses a threat.

This is a particularly harsh environment.

We get frigid temperatures.

Deep snow.

There's all these dominant predators here, competitors with mountain lions

that threaten youngsters.

So it's incredibly hard for small kittens to survive.

But the arrival of winter with long periods of sub-zero temperatures is not

all bad news.

For the scientists, it's also a time of opportunity.

This is capture season.

Fresno gives Mark and the team the best chance of tracking and capturing adult

mountain lions so they can add them to the study group.

It's essential work if their research is to be successful.

This time last year, we were monitoring 15 animals. That was nine adults and six

kittens.

Now, as we enter this capture season, we're down to six cats.

And that's because cats have been killed, cats dispersed,

collars have malfunctioned, and now we're trying to boost back up to

maintain our research for the next coming year.

The team have been joined by Boone Smith and his father, Sam.

Experienced mountain lion houndsmen. We're off. We'll go get them.

Today,

the team are on the hunt for a particularly large cat known as the

Crystal Male.

His nickname is a reference to a nearby creek, and Mark has made several

unsuccessful attempts to capture him before.

All right, let's catch this guy.

Look at that track right there, man.

Dogs are winning it.

The crystal male is currently the only resident male in the study area.

So understanding how he interacts with the females, like F51 and F61, is

crucial to Mark's research.

We've been following the cat for about a mile and a half.

He's come up here, and then he's rolled, throwing himself to this side.

Several times. You can see the back of him with all the fur sticking in the

snow.

And then his footprints.

We call these stand-up prints.

And you can see that this has gone all crispy from the heat of the body. He

spent enough time here that he melted the snow, so when he stood up in it, it

freezes those first few tracks.

And then he goes off in nice fresh tracks.

The tracks are so recent, the team ready the hounds.

If they get close to a mountain lion, it will instinctively take refuge in a

tree, allowing the scientist to catch up and, hopefully, capture it.

They're right now. They're on top of the rock line Depending on the chase it may

be minutes or possibly hours before the team see the hounds again

We got a long haul.

Having started at sunup, they finally reach the barking dogs late in the

afternoon.

The dogs have successfully chased their quarry up a tree.

He's big.

But with sunset less than an hour away...

Mark must work quickly.

So exciting.

It looks like we're going to catch the crystal male who has eluded us for two

years. And he's a big boy.

Gorgeous, gorgeous big boy.

And we tighten it. The plan is to anesthetize the cat using a dart gun.

Going hot.

Ready?

Time.

He's gonna go down this time, but the crystal male is not going to go easily

By the time Mark and the team catch up with the drugged cat, night is falling.

Okay,

go ahead, Mark.

Here, I need your headlamp. The crystal mail is so big, the collar they have

only just fits.

The collar's on.

So I think when he relaxes it's gonna be actually a pretty good fit There

you go the cat is given its study number m85

Having

checked his vital signs the team retreat to minimize disturbance as he comes

around

After a brief night's sleep, the team are eager to see if the collar is

working correctly.

We captured him right on the edge of this cliff, and he's moved up

there and then down along the cliff. And this is his usual travel route. We've

seen his sign all along here.

And he's going to just go back to his routine, heading into the center of his

home range.

Super.

That will probably keep him beyond the typical movements of hunters, so it's

nice to see.

Capturing M85 was particularly exciting for our research project.

Our study area is quite vast. I mean, it's over 2,000 square kilometers.

And these males have vast territories, four times sometimes the size of a

female territory.

Overlaying M85's movements with data from F51, F61 and other females

in the study area will be a significant contribution to the project's

understanding of male-female mountain lion dynamics.

Large herds of wintering elk are the main food source for mountain lions at

this time of year.

Easygoing F51 must average between three and four kills every month to feed her

young family.

They face other pressures too.

Nighttime temperatures have plummeted to minus 25 degrees centigrade.

Several of the kittens have lost the tips of their ears and tails to the

extreme cold.

If these unusually low temperatures persist, Mark knows the kittens may

struggle to survive.

We got a dead kitten.

The radio collar clearly identifies the body as one of F51's young kittens.

It was inevitable, but yeah.

There are no signs of a predator nearby.

OK, got the family group coming out this way.

So Mark examines the body to try and determine the course of death.

Skulls intact.

I live mountain lions.

I track them.

I watch videos of them.

I go to sleep at night and I dream about mountain lions.

It's such a privilege to be able to work with a species like this.

But when I come across the actual body of a dead mountain lion, I almost go

numb, and the scientist takes over.

Observe, record, figure out what happened.

External wounds, essentially non-existent.

I see absolutely no trauma, no signs.

But that night, it'll hit me.

They're part of my world.

You know, I'm following their lives every day.

And then it's a loss.

So small It looks like the kitten may have

died from exposure possibly after falling into a nearby stream

The

harsh conditions persist keeping predators and prey low down in the

valleys

So it's not surprising that F51's young family suffers another death a few weeks

later.

Her family were feeding on a carcass and a wolf pack came in and chased them up

the mountain and away.

And one kitten disappeared on the landscape.

There was no sign of that kitten ever again.

Easygoing F51 has now lost half of her original litter of four.

It'll be another year before her remaining six-month-old kittens are able

to fend for themselves.

It just goes to show how successful her neighbor Supermum F61 has been.

She has managed to raise two kittens from a litter of three almost to

adulthood.

frostbite and her brother are the mountain lion equivalent of teenagers

but like adolescents the world over they show little appreciation for their

mother's efforts her son in particular is trying to assert

his dominance

Soon, these youngsters will leave to establish their own territories.

When they do, their mother may well look for a male to mate with and have another

litter.

The most likely candidate is M85, the crystal male.

Since being collared, Mark has followed his movements closely.

A process that has given him a unique opportunity to witness some

extraordinary mountain lion behavior.

This particular day, I will remember forever.

It took us nearly two hours to locate where M85 was on this mountain. And I

set up the scope, and we had this camera rolling, and then this happened.

Something I never expected to see.

Here are three adult mountain lions moving on the landscape.

That is not antisocial. That is not solitary.

Three adult mountain lions, two females, sharing the male, if you will, like a

resource. And then the snow came in and made it impossible to track their

movements. But then when it cleared, we watched M85 mating.

with another mountain lion 10 feet away.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have predicted such an encounter.

And as far as I know, this has never, ever been documented.

One reason that M85 might be in such demand is that he's one of the few males

left in the study area.

M29, the father of F51's kittens, was shot recently by hunters, which means

breeding male mountain lions are in short supply.

However, M29's remaining offspring and their mother are thriving.

And if easygoing F51 can shepherd them successfully through the final weeks of

winter, their chances of continued survival will improve dramatically.

Now, with spring just around the corner, life should get easier.

But data from F51's collar reveals disturbing news.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

The email is an alert.

Mortality data means that F51's collar hasn't moved at all for 18 hours.

It may just have fallen off, but what's concerning is that the GPS data shows

that F-51 and M-85 have crossed paths.

While Mark's research has shown that mountain lion fights are rare, the signs

are ominous.

Mark heads off to solve the mystery.

On his way, he scans the snow for clues.

Something's going up and down here I want to look at.

Here she is. Here they are running across.

Look at the size of M85's footprint.

Big. Right here.

The trail leads Mark towards the GPS point indicated by the collar.

This is it That 51 and her family came down this chute And they must have been

making noise Kicking rocks or calling kittens playing who knows And a-95 comes

up right here right off his kill and they engage for the first time right

here and it's boom It's just covered in cat fur. These cats are actually

fighting in ten years of studying mountain lions. I've seen this once

before

fur everywhere look at them they've rolled over and they've gone downhill

and there's the first sign of blood you can see they've slid down the hill down

here let's just keep following it down oh my gosh i think i can see something

from here ah this is exactly what you don't want to see

oh it looks bad

unbelievable

It's F-51.

She's been killed by a bite to the head.

51. How many times I've seen her in the wild, slipping around a corner.

This is a huge loss for us, a huge loss for the project.

I'm just going to remove the collar.

And so she started the wild mountain lion, and she'll end the wild mountain

lion.

One question answered.

We now know what happened to F51.

But now the next question is, what's happening with our kittens?

All right, well, yeah.

Their future is bleak.

The tracks in the snow tell Mark what has happened, but there seems to be no

answer to the question why.

Spinning through the project's video archive doesn't help either.

There are plenty of instances of males interacting with females, but none

result in violence, even if the female has kittens with her.

Every time we've seen a male, approach a female outside courtship, this is

exactly what they do. They slink in. Notice how low he's holding his body to

the ground.

Notice how his ears are to the side and almost sagging. They minimize their

profile. They try to look smaller.

It is completely non-aggressive, non-threatening in every way.

He clearly just wants to share a meal, and you can see as he comes in, F61,

there's no hissing.

There's nothing. She just watches. She doesn't place herself in between her

kitten and him. And it's the kitten that does all the hissing.

There they are.

Massive resident adult male feeding on the carcass.

Three-month-old kitten and mother falling asleep in the background.

F51's orphaned kittens are now eight months old and can only be tracked with

basic radio technology, making it difficult to pinpoint their location.

Since their mother's death, they haven't been seen.

Only the rhythmic heartbeat of the radio signal tells the team that the kittens

are still alive.

The primary challenge that these kittens face is starvation.

Research would suggest that they have absolutely no chance at survival, that

most kittens orphaned less than one year old will die.

At least the spring thaw means F51's orphans won't freeze to death.

And four weeks after losing their mother, they've reached a spot where

Mark will be able to get a good look at them.

Hear that? There they are.

I'll bet you they're down the river bottom and let's see if we can have a

look.

Let me grab my pack.

Mark knows he has to tread carefully.

He could easily scare the kittens away.

I've got one.

She's eating this nasty.

nasty elk carcass.

That answers one question.

They've been surviving for a month on their own.

And this is the perfect time because all this food's appearing.

Look at that.

She's tearing into that old elk.

Where is her sister?

I got her.

She's just lying out there, right in the open.

If their mother had still

been alive the kittens would have remained within a fairly defined range

Without her influence the orphans roam far and wide

to scavenge for food

They're not the only cats on the move.

Springtime usually sees adolescent mountain lions leaving their mother to

establish their own territories.

It's often the biggest challenge they will ever face.

It's an uncertain time in the sense that they face unknown dangers. They are

navigating in between the territories of established mountain lions.

They are trying to find a place where they have other mountain lions nearby so

that they can socialize and mate, and also have the resources in terms of prey

that can sustain them and their future families.

Supermum F61's son has gone north, out of the study area, but her daughter,

Frostbite, has remained close to home.

So I'm just going to pull up Frostbite's data.

It's really been fun to watch her sort of explore and try to disperse, if you

will, and then return to her mother a couple of times.

So here, for instance, we saw a little exploratory journey out into the

national park and then finally started moving south.

And of course, she's following the natural terrain, just following the

mountains down. And she follows them straight down to the town of Jackson.

And she's been the perfect mountain lion in the sense that nobody knows that

she's there.

Despite her proximity to town, Frostbite appears to be doing well.

This mule deer carcass may be evidence of her first independent kill.

Remote cameras are set up.

Under the cover of darkness, Frostbite reveals herself.

She's doing super.

She's on her own. She's surviving.

She's hunting.

She's establishing a territory.

She's doing everything we would hope that a dispersing mountain lion would

have the opportunity to do.

Frostbite has proved that she has the skills to survive on her own, even in a

noisy neighborhood.

F51's orphaned kittens.

have yet to develop their survival skills.

Small prey like squirrels might supply them with enough to eat.

But that would depend on them catching one.

Mark's video archive offers an insight into the challenges the nine-month-old

orphans face.

This video is particularly difficult to watch.

F61 has maimed a fawn and left her kittens to figure it out.

And you can see these two kittens, which are 12 months old, have no idea how to

kill it. They're batting it and trying to figure out how to turn this into

food.

This is important because it illustrates how inequipped kittens are to survive on

their own, even at one year old, and how dependent upon their mothers they are,

even at this age.

Mark hadn't expected the kittens to survive longer than a month on their

own. Somehow they've scraped by, scavenging from carcasses they've found.

Both are smaller than they should be but while one of them looks alert the other

is lethargic clearly struggling

Now

ten weeks after their mother's death mark heads out to check on them again

For one the struggle has proved too much

Mark finds the corpse of the weaker kitten, F-75.

I can only imagine that she starved to death.

Which is not surprising, given that the last time we saw her, she looked bony.

Her hips were jutting out.

You could see that she was significantly slimmer, skinnier than her sister.

We'll keep following F99 and hope for the best.

is now the sole survivor of F51's final litter.

Holy mackerel. Watch that back leg.

There we go.

The number of this female is going to be 99.

99.

Correct.

F99's chances of continued survival will depend on her learning to hunt on her

own.

Scavenging food from old kills is inherently risky.

Carcasses attract all sorts of predators.

Even other scavengers are a threat.

Circling vultures indicate a carcass is nearby But these

bald eagles aren't willing to share the spoils

On this occasion, F99 is chased away, hungry but unhurt.

Surprisingly, over the next few weeks, she appears to put on weight.

It's just a hunch, but Mark and his team suspect she may have figured out how to

hunt.

No sign of her.

The only way to be sure is to fit her with a GPS collar and watch for the

telltale cluster of data points that could indicate a kill.

Gorgeous. That's what we want to eat.

So they set up a baited trap to lure her in.

Nice little treasure for her.

There she goes.

The lure works.

There.

Once she's been anesthetized she's kept wet to stop her overheating now mark can

fit a collar and check her health So f99 looks way better than I expected.

She's thin she's small She's essentially a stunted version of a mountain lion

just barely half of what I expected her to weigh at this time 16 16

But she looks really well.

She's actually got, you know, musculature developing.

She's all right.

There's one development that is a particularly good sign.

Here are her adult teeth that have begun to come in. They're not full-size yet,

but they're big enough to do some hunting.

Having confirmed that F99 is healthy... and has the weaponry to make a kill, the

team follow her movements closely over the next few days.

Almost immediately, a suspicious cluster of points draws Mark into the field.

Yes!

She's killed something.

Look at the fur.

It's the remains of a coyote pup, which the orphan has picked clean.

That's the tail.

She even gave a good chew on that.

This is a big deal.

She killed something with teeth, something that could fight back.

This is a turning point.

She might just make it and survive the winter.

F99 has surprised us at every turn.

The fact that she learned to hunt on her own and survived in a landscape

with predators and people and all sorts of other dangers.

Throughout this entire year, she has persevered.

I remember one of the bits of video that we caught. She's under this tree in this

vast meadow, and it's pouring rain.

And there she is, this tiny little mountain lion, alone.

And you just feel how alone she is.

And so it's warming to see when she's doing well.

F99 is not the only one at a turning point.

The scientists of the Teton Cougar Project are presenting their findings to

the wider scientific community.

This young female still lives locally and is doing quite well.

Mark's work is pretty amazing because he's using a new technology to really

teach us new things about this keystone predator.

So many things that we haven't known about cougars that are coming to light

through this work.

It's just astonishing.

A lot of the things that we're learning show us how highly social cougars are.

And the cougar-to-cougar interactions are just extremely powerful.

The project's work is also solving the riddle behind the dramatic drop in

mountain lion numbers.

There are two governing factors.

So as wolves increased in the system, all three age classes dropped in

survivorship.

The reintroduction of wolves has had a dramatic effect on a kitten's chances of

making it to adulthood.

Only 20 kittens out of 100 survive until they're 18 months old.

And most of them are killed by other predators.

When it comes to adult mountain lions, One factor accounts for a staggering 49%

of all deaths in the study area.

Hunting. The dual impacts of competition with new wolves in a place where you

already had existing human harvest on mountain lions is resulting in a decline

in this population.

Mark's figures show that the only realistic way to stabilize the mountain

lion numbers is by dramatically reducing the amount of hunting.

But striking a balance between the interests of conservationists and

hunters is likely to be difficult.

The agency responsible for managing hunting quotas generates much of its

income through the sale of hunting licenses.

We've really worked to use the best available information to use...

decades and centuries of expertise and education in order to learn about the

wildlife populations that we're responsible to manage correctly.

It would be extremely controversial if we got rid of hunting in the state of

Wyoming or in other areas.

which means she could legally be hunted.

But for the time being, she's managed to avoid both hunters and wolves.

She's finding it hard. She's lost some weight in the last month.

She killed a porcupine recently.

I think I can make out a quill right here.

That's concerning because porcupine quills, they have barbs one direction.

And so the more you move your skin, they go deeper and deeper and deeper.

Cat could survive.

This is her.

I think she's gonna make it.

Mark's hopes prove ill-founded.

Two weeks later, F99 died from internal injuries caused by the porcupine's

quills.

In contrast, F61's daughter, Frostbite, has successfully established her

territory, avoiding hunters and predators, enduring freezing

temperatures, and making enough kills to survive.

Thanks to her and all the mountain lions that the Teton Cougar Project has

followed over the years, Our understanding of these cats has been

revolutionized.

Their long-term future, however, depends on how we apply this newfound knowledge.

For Frostbite and the other mountain lions here, life remains on the edge.

The monkey that can order a picnic on a phone. Smarter than you think. Monkey

Planet on BBC4 now.

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It's a matter of life and debt next on BBC2.