Marc Benioff ’s mountain lion sighting stirs worry in S.F.
Cougar seen on billionaire Benioff ’s security footage
The unnerving discovery of a mountain lion lurking around the mansions in the Presidio and Sea Cliff has created an uproar in San Francisco, where wildlife experts are trying to figure out how and why the fearsome carnivore ventured into the city.
The predator can plainly be seen on security-camera footage taken at 5 a.m. Wednesday loping past the home of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who lives in Presidio Heights.
The billionaire tech executive also recorded a cougar on Saturday on surveillance video, leaving his multimillionaire neighbors to wonder whether the big cats are settling in San Francisco or one lonely lion was simply out trolling.
“We believe it’s just one mountain lion at this point,” said Peter Tira, the Fish and Wildlife spokesman, adding that it is probably a juvenile male. “We do find young male lions stumbling into developed areas. A lot of times, they are looking for a home range to call their own and they wander into places they aren’t supposed to be.”
Wildlife experts say the big cat either found its way to the Presidio from wildland areas on the Peninsula, swam across the bay or sauntered over the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the night, a path
coyotes have been known to take.
“It’s a bit of a mystery,” said Chris Wilmers, a professor at UC Santa Cruz who tracks cougars for the Santa Cruz Puma Project, which he started in 2008. If the animal came from the Peninsula, “he’d have a hard time getting that many miles into San Francisco without somebody seeing him.”
Zara McDonald, the president of the Felidae Conservation Fund, a Marin County-based nonprofit that studies wild cat species, said it is very unlikely the cougar came over the bridge because there aren’t any pumas in the Marin Headlands. In fact, she said, no mountain lions have been detected on remote cameras south of Muir Woods in four years.
She said that one mountain lion detected north of the Golden Gate is an elderly cat with an ocular defect that was photographed over the past few years using research cameras on the northwest side of Mount Tamalpais. McDonald believes the animal most likely came from Sweeney Ridge, Montara Mountain or the Crystal Springs Reservoir area on the Peninsula.
“I would say that based on the history here and our work south of San Francisco that it’s very possible that this lion could have come from the south,” she said. “They are masters at stealth. They know how to remain out of sight.”
The only way to know for sure, Wilmers said, is to capture the cougar and test its blood. Previous studies have shown the species north and south of the Golden Gate Bridge have different, very distinct, genetics.
Benioff has been busy lately with Dreamforce, a tech conference in downtown San Francisco, but he found the time to send out an alarmed tweet Wednesday about the latest visit, which was captured on security footage and posted on Twitter and YouTube.
The first visit came on the same day of another reported sighting of a cougar near 27th Avenue and Lake Street.
Pumas were also spotted by citizens in and around San Francisco four times in June and July 2015, including surveillance footage of a cougar in the Sea Cliff neighborhood and a reported sighting the same day in the Presidio.
That creature was spotted by members of the public near Lincoln and Washington boulevards in the Presidio near Fort Winfield Scott. It was also seen on the 1000 block of Gough Street on July 1, and in southwest San Francisco near Lake Merced on July 3, officials said.
Wildlife officials believe there are between 4,000 and 6,000 mountain lions in California. Tira said their territory can extend from 10 to 400 square miles, so it isn’t unusual for roaming animals to find themselves in populated areas.
Human-cougar encounters in the Bay Area mostly occur because mountain lion travel corridors have been blocked by development. One such incident occurred in May 2014 when a large male puma — which had a GPS-tracking collar — hid behind a small hedge on a busy street in Mountain View for nine hours as pedestrians and bicyclists passed only a few feet away.
The confused cat eventually was tranquilized amid a community furor and released in the hills, but he was later killed trying to cross Interstate 280.
He wasn’t the only cougar to run into trouble. At least a half dozen of the animals have been hit and killed trying to cross Highway 17, particularly along the treacherous Laurel Curve in Santa Cruz County.
“They are just trying to find habitat and they are running into barriers,” McDonald said. “I’m sure we will see more of this because there is just too much fragmented habitat, which makes it hard for the lions to avoid this scenario once in a while.”
The Puma Project is working with Caltrans to design fencing that would channel wildlife into culverts under highways on the Peninsula and South Bay.
Although California mountain lions are strong enough to kill and eat a grown man, recent studies have shown that the sharp-clawed carnivores almost always run away when they hear humans approaching. Studies of the more than 40 collared animals in the Santa Cruz Mountains showed that they often kill deer in residential areas, but spend less time feeding when they are near humans.
It is unusual for a cougar to find its way into San Francisco.
Wilmers said the cougar could probably survive in the Presidio on raccoons, possum, feral cats and maybe a coyote or two for as long as a month, but no more.
“There’s enough tree cover in there for it to find places to lay low during the day, but it’s not going to want to live there for long before it decides to get out,” he said. “That’s when it will probably end up getting stuck in someone’s backyard.”
Tira said residents should be wary, but not overly concerned. He advises anyone who encounters a mountain lion to stand tall, act aggressively and never run away. Throw rocks if the puma remains close, he said.