MORGAN HILL
– A mountain lion led Morgan Hill police on an excursion through
neighborhoods and grasslands Tuesday afternoon, but escaped without
incident into the open fields west of the city.
MORGAN HILL – A mountain lion led Morgan Hill police on an excursion through neighborhoods and grasslands Tuesday afternoon, but escaped without incident into the open fields west of the city.
School board trustee Shellé Thomas spotted the big cat lying in brush behind a house on Appian Way off Sunnyside Avenue just after 1 p.m. The neighborhood is at the edge of open space that runs along Sycamore Avenue and out to Oak Glen Avenue.
Police were called to the scene and notified residents in the surrounding neighborhoods. A house at 15369 Sycamore Dr. backed up to the Appian Way house.
Lt. Terrie Booten said the mountain lion showed no aggressiveness but, nevertheless, was a worry.
“Officers went door to door because our concern was to notify the public,” said Booten.
Police swept the open field below and behind the Appian Way houses, checked up in trees and met county sheriff’s deputies who were coming in from the west, also looking for the cat.
“The cat was last seen heading west,” Booten said.
This was just the latest in a series of big cat sightings on both sides of the valley.
Two weeks ago a Jackson Oaks woman came face to face with a mountain lion near her Circle Drive house while out searching for a lost dog. Other Jackson Oaks and Holiday Lake Estates residents reported seeing mountain lions and finding deer carcasses in their yards. The areas are in the city’s east hills.
In March, three teenage mountain lions were found in a backyard near Hale and Llagas Avenues next to Shadow Mountain School on the west side of the city. One escaped and was hit and killed by a car, a second had to be killed by police when it tried to get into the house, but a third was captured and released into the hills.
Mountain lion experts say the animals’ increasing presence in residential areas is caused by new construction pushing further into mountain lion territory. This leaves the big cats little choice but to forage for food where it can be found, which is occasionally in people’s back yards.
By encouraging fawns and deer with salt licks and water troughs, residents of near-wild areas make their neighborhoods more attractive to lions, since lions feed on deer.
Pets in backyards and wandering loose draw the big cats as the wild and the tame attempt to share the same territory.
The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office recently rehired veteran fish and game warden Henry Coletto as its mountain lion expert. The formerly retired woodsman’s new part-time job is to map lion sightings, investigate unusual ones, get all county agencies to use the same system for reporting lions and train police and animal control officers around the county how best to deal with the big cats.
Booten said Coletto was not called to the scene Tuesday because the incident was over so quickly and because the mountain lion did not threaten people or animals, but instead moved off into the grassland.
It has, in the past been unusual for mountain lions to be seen during daylight hours. They normally hunt for deer during dawn and dusk.
As far as advice, Booten said: “Give them an avenue of escape. Don’t back them into a corner.”
