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Cougar Management Guidelines-First Edition, by the Cougar Management Guidelines Working Group.1 2005. 137 pp. WildFutures, Bainbridge Island, Washington, USA. $21.95 (paper).
Development of the Cougar Management Guidelines was conceived at the Sixth Mountain Lion Workshop at San Antonio, Texas, USA, in 2000, with the realization that the body of cougar management and research literature had grown to the point that agencies and stakeholders were having difficulty keeping up with current knowledge. Guidelines were developed following similar efforts for pronghorn (Lee et al. 1998) and bighorn sheep (Thomas and Thomas 2000). The authors of Cougar Management Guidelines are 13 wildlife professionals with over 200 years of cumulative experience in cougar management, policy, and research. This book begins with a chapter providing historical perspective on cougar management and policies and proposes maintaining landscape-level connectivity to sustain population viability and regional management, basing management strategies on the best-available science, and adopting an adaptive management framework from which to evaluate assumptions and the effects of management prescriptions. The authors intend this effort to be continuous, with a perpetual working group that will interact with wildlife agencies and stakeholders and work toward updating future editions as new information becomes available.
Cougar-prey relationships, with special emphasis on densitydependent factors in cougar management decisions, are covered in Chapter II. For example, factors such as prey nutritional status, pregnancy rate, and litter size can indicate whether prédation or forage is most likely in limiting prey populations. Other concepts addressed include conditions where a predator-pit may exist (e.g., isolated bighorn sheep population where cougar numbers are sustained by other, more abundant prey), the adaptive and opportunistic nature of cougar prédation, the potential influence of other carnivores, and the role cougars play in the structure and diversity of ecological communities.
Chapter III reviews cougar habitat-use patterns and emphasizes mapping cougar habitat at large scales to better assess connectivity and to delineate cougar subpopulations as source or sink areas relative to management objectives, where, in the absence of immigration, source subpopulations exhibit positive growth and sink subpopulations exhibit negative growth. Source areas include large, connected regions of suitable cougar habitat, and...