What to do if you encounter a cougar

I was around 16, sitting on the front porch talking to my friend on the phone, as many millennial teens did, when I heard a loud screech erupt from the pasture behind my childhood home in Oklahoma.

I had a split-second flashback to years earlier, during a camping trip, when my Girl Scout leader described the sound a mountain lion makes. “It sounds exactly like a woman screaming,” she said. We didn’t believe her. How could that be so? We’d seen “The Lion King.” We knew lions roared.

I immediately hung up the phone and dashed inside to tell my dad there was a mountain lion nearby. We needed to check on the cattle.

Through my teen years, my family’s land remained in that lion’s territory. My cousin saw it from a tree stand while deer hunting on our land. Workers from a natural gas company saw it while checking well sites. I heard it twice.

Given those encounters, I felt a little jumpy when I started hiking in L.A. I knew it was extremely rare to see a mountain lion while out hiking, but having heard one in person, it didn’t feel rare.

As experts like Robert Martinez (L.A.’s unofficial mountain lion man) point out, my experience falls far outside that of the average SoCal hiker.

For the last 12 years, Martinez has documented mountain lions, bears and other local wildlife using more than 20 trail cameras that he sets up, thanks to a permit, in Angeles National Forest. What started as Martinez simply wanting to see a lion has turned into what is essentially a research project that helps forest officials and wildlife advocates better understand the catamount population.

When it came time to research ways Wilders can stay safe if they see a mountain lion on the trail, he was the first person I called.

Even though Martinez admits he’d love to see them more often, he emphasized how rare it is to see a lion in person. He has been in the woods hundreds of times and is actively looking for lion tracks and scrapes — the territorial marks they leave, similar to the long marks your house cat makes in their litter box — and still has only seen lions three times. They all wanted to get far, far away from him.

The first time, he was walking at night with a flashlight on a trail he’d visited numerous times.

“Within the first seven to nine minutes, I’m walking, and I see these big yellow eyes” near the end of a long footbridge, he said.

He moved his flashlight past its face and caught a glimpse. “I lost my mind at that moment,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ ” The lion, about 100 feet away, turned around and left.

Along with learning how to respond if you do encounter a ghost cat, I hope you’ll glean from below a better understanding of how important it is that we continue to conserve the lands where these big cats live. It’s for everyone’s safety, including the lions’.

1. Stay calm and be big

If you do see a cougar on the trail, the first step is to remain calm. Do not run. Do not turn your back.

You should never play dead in front of a cat, the Sacramento-based Mountain Lion Foundation advises. Instead you should maintain eye contact and do everything you can to look bigger: stand up straight, open your coat and raise your arms. Wave your arms slowly and speak in a firm, loud tone. If necessary, throw items at the lion. But not before giving the cat the space and time to walk away.

2. If you have a small child or dog with you, pick them up

Preferably you would do this without bending over. And if you can, put them on your shoulders to help you appear even bigger.

If hiking with a dog, pull your dog as close to you as you can. Pick it up if it’s small, but be mindful how you do this because “you don’t want to bend down so low you now don’t look like an adult human,” said Tim Daly, a public information officer at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

3. Make a lot of noise

When it comes to encounters with bears, experts say simply letting the bear know you’re there might be enough, and that you shouldn’t startle it. But with mountain lions, you really do want to be quite loud. And extra points for creativity.

One 9-year-old boy frightened a mountain lion away by playing his trumpet, according to the Mountain Lion Foundation.

“Make sounds that aren’t natural at all,” Martinez said. “If you’ve got metal pans and a spoon, bang it really hard. Whatever you’ve got that can be the most obnoxious, loud, piercing sound I think will help you because they’re not used to hearing those kinds of things on a day-to-day basis, so that might make them go: ‘What the hell is that?’ and get out of there,” Martinez said.

Then watch how it reacts, slowly backing away, “and hope that lion has better things to do than worry about you,” Daly said.

4. Get out of there

Daly said even if the lion leaves, it’s probably best to leave the area yourself and then report the sighting to a nearby ranger and on the state’s wildlife incident reporting system, which researchers check frequently.

Mountain lion attacks on humans are rare, but they do happen. Since 1890, there have been fewer than 50 verified mountain lion attacks on humans in California, including six fatal incidents, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. In most cases, the person was alone when they were attacked.

Of the documented attacks, just over a dozen have been on children. This is why wildlife officials stress the importance of keeping children close while out hiking.

That is hard to hear. I do draw comfort, though, in the fact that millions of people visit our mountains every year, and attacks, especially fatal ones, from any animal remain rare.

The experts I spoke to stressed that, if you’ve hiked in Southern California, you’ve likely hiked past a mountain lion. But we rarely see them in part because there just aren’t that many lions in California. It is estimated that we have only between 3,200 and 4,500 lions in the entire state (compared to the estimated 65,405 black bears here).

“No lion is raised to hunt humans. There’s no mom lion out there, telling them, ‘Oh, when times are thin, you know, we will get that guy right there or that hiker,’” Martinez said. “Lions aren’t looking for people at all.”

Often, he said, when a lion does attack, the data show one reason is because humans were encroaching on their shrinking habitat, further underscoring how important it is to protect our wildlands.