This must be what your talking about voodod..
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State tracking cougars' interaction with people via GPS
Bob Mottram
The Tacoma News Tribune
January 22, 2003


What do you see in Washington's future? A burgeoning human population? Increasingly impacted traffic? Widespread urbanization of the countryside?
Here's what Donny Martorello sees:


He sees cougars and people living side by side. And he sees it as "a permanent part of Washington's future."


Martorello manages the cougar, bear and special species section of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.


It's that view, shared by him and others, that has given impetus to the department's plan to scrutinize the relationship between people and cougars in Western Washington. The goal is to figure out how the two can get along. The study already started east of the Cascades, but biologists won't know all they need to know until the effort comes over the hill.


All told, the project will take five to eight years. It started last winter near Cle Elum, where scientists are studying how cougars and people interact in a rural environment. Next winter, it will begin its second phase, in a new study area.


"That will be the whole front-country stretch from about North Bend to Carnation," Martorello said. "The purpose will be to compare and contrast how cats and people interact in a more residential or suburban setting."


Biologists will collar as many cats in that part of King County as they can catch, and outfit them with global positioning system transmitters. Older-style transmitters require a person to go out in the woods and determine the approximate location of a collared animal by using a radio-direction-finder antenna. All the person knows when he's done is approximately where the animal was at the moment he checked.


Global positioning system collars, on the other hand, transmit a stream of data to an orbiting satellite, which forwards them to a ground receiver, plotting and recording all of the details of the animal's travels over long periods of time.


"We'll be getting the very best data you can get," Martorello said. "The wealth of the data is beyond anything we've done. So we'll really be able to take a unique look as to how cats interact with people in a suburban environment."


Researchers want to find out how such interaction is influenced by habitat, and also to answer some questions about the Western Washington cougar population itself: Is it stable? How many young live to become adults each year? What percentage of the population overall survives an average year? How many cats can you expect to find in a particular kind of environment?


The questions are virtually unending: Are West Side cougar populations transient? Or do they consist of cats that live for only a few months because mortality is so high? Or, are they truly sustainable populations?


Are all of the cougars or only some of the cougars in suburban fringe habitats in conflict with people? Of those that are, what makes them distinctive? Are they of a certain age or gender? Are they predisposed to conflict for some other reasons?


And why does the state want to know these things?


"By knowing," Martorello said, "we can better manage for the interaction between people and cougars."


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