Mountain lions encountered in & around Helmville recently

A pair of incidents in the last month involving mountain lions in the Helmville area serves as a reminder that, while wolves and grizzlies may get the lion’s share of press, they’re not the only big carnivores around.

The first call came Jan. 16, when personnel at Helmville School reported a dead deer hung up on a fence in the area. Lincoln-area Game Warden Ezra Schwalm found and removed the deer and followed lion tracks back to the road, where he lost them. He went to the school and asked them to give him a call back if they saw more tracks or saw the cat itself.

He said normally cats just move on, but he wondered where this particular lion had disappeared to. Returning to the area he notices some fresh holes in the snow and saw where the lion had gone around an abandoned house to a hole underneath it.

“The tracks went right to that opening,” he said. “I shined my light in there and the thing almost got a hold of me.”

Schwalm realized the cat, a young male, had been living in town, hiding under different abandoned buildings.

Calling on a local houndsman, they were able to run that cat and tree it in town, where it was dispatched.

“It doesn’t typically happen like that. It’s always unfortunate to have to remove something for management purposes,” Schwalm said. He said lions will typically come into a town like Helmville or Lincoln, kill some town deer, then move on. That wasn’t the case this time.

“If there was ever a lion that needed removed, it was that one,” he said. “It set up shop there and it probably wasn’t going to go away. It treed right there in town and it didn’t want to leave.”

Schwalm said signs showed it had been hanging around Helmville for quite some time, but had gone unnoticed until it killed the deer that got hung up on the fence and it couldn’t keep dragging it.

The second report, on Feb. 8, involved a mountain lion following kids in the Helmville area.

Schwalm, who was out of the area at the time, said the incident happened near a residence on ranch property north of Helmville. He coordinated with the same houndsman he’d called on in January, who ran this cat as well.

“That cat was not removed, it ran off,” Schwalm said, adding that it appeared to have been a very young lion that was simply hanging out in an area it shouldn’t’ have been. So far, he hasn’t had any reports of it returning. “That’s pretty typical. When you put the run on those cats they don’t really want to come back to that spot.”

Since he couldn’t respond to the call himself, Schwalm was unable to confirm that the young lion was intentionally following the kids, but he said it’s certainly possible. As far as he knows, though, the cat never tried to attack anyone.

Schwalm said he wasn’t shocked to hear of a second lion report so closely behind the first one. He said typical reports involve lion tracks or reports of cats that are moving through an area, but for some reason when calls come in about lions that need immediate attention, they tend to come in pairs, within a couple weeks of one another.

Although these reports came from the Helmville area, Schwalm said there seems to be a healthy lion population throughout the Upper Blackfoot these days, noting that Lincoln probably has more lions moving through town than most people are aware of. As a reminder, he said folks in Lincoln who may still be feeding deer need to know that lions are drawn to places deer congregate. “It may take a couple of years, it may take a couple week, but you’re going to get a mountain lion if you’re feeding the deer.”