GILROY
– A driver hit a mountain lion northwest of Gilroy this morning,
adding to a series of recent puma sightings in and around the
city.
GILROY – A driver hit a mountain lion northwest of Gilroy this morning, adding to a series of recent puma sightings in and around the city.
The driver hit the cat at about 6:25 a.m. on Watsonville Road at Day Road, according to sheriff’s Deputy Terrance Helm. It was still alive when deputies arrived but critically injured. A deputy shot the puma once and killed it.
“It was in bad shape,” Helm said.
Deputies then brought the dead female cat to the South County Animal Shelter in San Martin.
It was foggy at the time of the accident, and the juvenile female puma jumped a fence into the roadway and hit the side of the moving car, the driver told deputies. Then a car traveling in the opposite direction ran over it, the driver reported.
Meanwhile, the city of Gilroy announced Thursday that a motorist saw two mountain lions together Tuesday morning on Miller Avenue, between Christmas Hill Park and Santa Teresa Boulevard.
Assistant Police Chief Lanny Brown also said Wednesday he recently saw a mountain lion at that same spot, coming out of Christmas Hill Park.
A mountain lion also has been reported behind Gavilan Community College on the southwest side of Gilroy. Warning signs have been posted for several years throughout the college campus.
Officials with the Santa Clara Valley Water District said earlier this week that residents are reporting an increase in mountain lion sightings near local creeks in Santa Clara County.
“It’s not like there’s all of a sudden a tremendous influx of mountain lions,” said Lt. Dave Fox, a 27-year veteran with the state Fish and Game Department, based in Monterey. “It seems like people are becoming more aware of them since this recent attack in Orange County.”
On Jan. 8, a mountain lion attacked and severely injured a 30-year-old woman cycling in Orange County. Subsequently a dead man – victim of a lion attack – was found nearby.
In Fox’s nearly three decades with the department, he’s seen the mountain lion population grow with the lifting of a bounty on them in 1963 and Proposition 117 in 1990, which banned hunting them. Pumas can only be killed by peace officers or if they are killing livestock.
“They’re not rare,” Fox said. “We consider them common. … Not as common as coyotes, but common. … We get sightings reported almost daily.”
Some of these sightings are actually bobcats, Fox said, but if you see a large cat with a long tail, “You probably saw a mountain lion.”
The fact that a puma was killed on the road did not surprise Fox at all. He suspected the cats are not much smarter than deer when it comes to avoiding vehicles on the road, especially when they are blinded by headlights at night.
The attack in Orange County was the 13th recorded mountain lion attack on a human in California in 114 years, a state Fish and Game biologist said. Of those 13, five have been fatal.
Deputies shot the cat because they deemed it was suffering.
