To catch a predator: the wildlife detective helping ranchers and mountain lions coexist
Petros Chrysafis has always had a fascination with predators, but he never thought he could make a career out of it. Then he helped a friend solve a chicken-stealing coyote problem. Word spread. Now he runs a one-man “predator detection and deterrence” business in California’s Central valley and Sierra Nevada mountains.
His job is an odd combo of forensic scientist, homicide detective, set designer and negotiator.Typically when he first meets his clients, they are ready to find and kill the predator that’s been attacking their livestock. His goal is to offer an alternative: coexistence.
Chrysafis, age 33, grew up in the Republic of Cyprus, where the largest beast of prey is a red fox. Today, he treks out into predator country without fear. “No point carrying bear spray,” Chrysafis said. “I’m a pretty big dude.”
He works on about 60 cases a year in California’s backcountry settlements, grazing lands and mountain communities. When he arrives at a farm where owners have just lost livestock, emotions often run high. “There’s anger and then there’s grief that you have to navigate,” he said. “This work is 90% human conflict, 10% wildlife conflict.”
His process begins with identifying the local predator. To gather information, Chrysafis deploys his secret weapon: trail cameras. He walks the land, looking at it say, how a mountain lion might see it – the vantage point of a high ridgeline, the draw of a pond – and places cameras by the clearings and trails where animals are most likely to walk by. The cameras are motion-activated, and store a few thousand timestamped photos – shots of wildlife slipping by, sniffing the air and glowing like ghosts in night vision captures.
The images he gathers often help to put landowners at ease; caught on film, even a mountain lion can seem less like an unseen stalker and more like an introverted neighbor. “It does change people’s perception of things,” Chrysafis said. “It helps people like the wildlife that they live with.”
Once the culprit is identified, Chrysafis sets out a plan to deter them from going after livestock again. Every animal spooks differently. Flashing lights usually scare off mountain lions and bobcats, but coyotes quickly get used to them. A trusty guardian llama can run off coyotes, but might become lunch for a mountain lion.
Many of Chrysafis’s deterrence techniques are designed to simulate human activity. Element by element, he builds up an elaborate theater of human presence. The tools he uses to keep up this grand illusionhave the unsophisticated charm of Home Alone booby traps: radios playing a constant murmur of voices, flickering motion lights that mimic a human with a flashlight, “Critter Gitters” that emit startling high-pitched sounds.
One effective predator-repellent is human smell: Chrysafis hangs detergent packets in trees, or wrings the sweat out of his own shirt.
The best audio for perturbing predators is lengthy, animated and includes multiple voices, so sometimes Chrysafis records his own Dungeons & Dragons sessions and plays them out hour after hour through solar-powered radios, like a digital St Francis preaching to the animals.
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In the American west’s long history of hunting and trapping, Chrysafis’s approach is a softer one. He tries to communicate the real value of wildlife to ranchers, while recognizing the need to keep their livestock safe.
Finding solutions for predator deterrence is only going to become more necessary. Legal protections have helped mountain lion, black bear and bobcat populations slowly rise over the last few decades. At the same time, human activity is encroaching on predators’ habitats, making conflict more likely.
Among Chrysafis’s most frequent interlocutors in the hills and ranges of California is the mountain lion.
For most of California’s history, mountain lions were aggressively hunted; the state paid out a bounty for every dead lion until 1969 and the population crashed. Then, in 1972, mountain lion hunting was made illegal in the state.
Elusive and wide-ranging, the animals are hard to count, but state agencies estimate that today the state population is holding steady somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 cats.
Humans are still the leading cause of mortality for mountain lions in the state. Their habitat is being destroyed and fragmented; increasingly, mountain lion populations are hemmed in and isolated from each other by uncrossable highways.
The debate over mountain lionlivestock conflict is complex, and exemplifies the nuances of Chrysafis’s job.
Conservationists want mountain lion numbers to rise: a healthy predator population has a cascade of positive effects on an ecosystem.By removing old and sick animals, apex predators keep deer populations healthy and slow the spread of chronic wasting disease. Hundreds of other animals benefit from mountain lion kills, from the small mammals that steal scraps to the insects that pass entire life cycles on the carcass, to the birds that eat the insects.
But many California farmers and ranchers feel that mountain lion protections come at an unreasonable cost to livestock owners. On social media groups for agricultural professionals, posts about mountain lion sightings are full of comments like “The only good cat is a dead cat” and “SSS” – shorthand for “shoot, shovel and shut up”. It’s impossible to know how many mountain lions are killed quietly and illegally.
There is also a legal route for killing mountain lions in California. If a mountain lion kills three livestock animals in the state and non-lethal deterrents aren’t working, landowners can apply for a “lethal depredation permit”. About 100 mountain lions in the state are killed on these permits every year, most of which have been awarded to homesteads, ranches and hobby farms: places where each animal represents a significant investment.
For Chrysafis, the permits mean that he’s often working against a ticking clock: he has to find a way to deter the animal before it takes its third forbidden meal.
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Chelsea Wilhite and her husband Wayne live on a small homestead in Oakhurst, California, 50 miles south of Yosemite valley. They own 13 sheep, two dozen chickens and a handful of turkeys: all potentially appealing prey for the mountain lions, bears and coyotes that pass through their property. Their predator deterrents are working, but there have been some close calls. The wooden door of their chicken coop is splintered and grooved with bear claw marks. “Our laying hens have names,” Wilhite says. “It’s personal.”
Chrysafis recommends a multipronged approach to deterrence; Wilhite’s property has mobile electric fencing and LED lights that gleam in the darkness, designed to look like a pair of glinting, watchful eyes. They also employ one of the oldest (and best) predator deterrents: a well-trained livestock guardian dog, or “LGD”. Willhite’s LGD, Bree, sleeps out with the sheep, digging herself a little bed in the grass every night. Since they’ve had Bree, Wilhite and her husband have stopped seeing bears on their property. But they still dread an eventual predation event.
“Overall, livestock loss to predators is tiny,” said Chrysafis, “But look at Chelsea. If they lose one or two sheep, that’s a huge blow to them. And not just financially, but emotionally.”
When a predation has occurred, Chrysafis analyzes the carcass, looking for clues about the killer. Mountain lion victims usually have distinctive puncture wounds on the back of the neck or head, from the lion’s two-inch-long canine teeth. Coyotes generally attack the hind legs, to pull the animal to the ground. Wild predators kill precisely. Mountain lions eat the nutrient-rich internal organs first: liver, kidney and lungs.
Nearly half of the predation cases Chrysafis works on are committed by dogs, both feral packs and roaming pets. Mountain lions often take the blame. Tracking down the offending dog can create tensions with neighbors and the general fear of mountain lions makes them an appealing scapegoat. “It’s a much easier way out,” said Chrysafis. “There may be some truth to it – they may eventually lose a goat to a mountain lion. But then you also lost four goats to your neighbor’s dogs.”
When livestock has been killed, a non-lethal response can be a hard sell – but Chrysafis tries to show that keeping your local mountain lion alive is good for everyone. The best predator deterrent is another, bigger predator – so if you can find deterrents that reliably work on your mountain lion neighbor, he’ll stay away from your livestock, and so will other wildlife. If you shoot him, a new mountain lion or a pack of coyotes will fill the power vacuum and you start from scratch. You’re better off with the predator you know.
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Chrysafis funds his work through small business grants and environmental consulting work. The money doesn’t really cover the time he spends working cases. But by operating independently, he’s able to work with the government-wary ranchers who might never reach out to US Fish and Wildlife or to non-profit conservation groups –people who might not otherwise seriously consider non-lethal approaches. “My appeal is that I’m not linked to government agencies,” said Chrysafis. “I’m just a dude.”
Often, his clients pay him in eggs, meat and offal. Like a mountain lion, he considers the internal organs to be the choicest meats. “A lot of the stuff that Americans don’t eat, I’ll take,” he says. “It’s a comfort food for me. Whenever I was sick, my grandma was like, ‘Here’s some entrails of an animal.’”
For all his work studying mountain lions, Chrysafis has never encountered one face to face. But they’ve seen him. Once, he opened a batch of trail cam photos to see himself walking away from the camera, followed a minute or two later by a big, tawny mountain lion padding casually behind him. She wasn’t stalking him – she was just a shy neighbor, keeping a polite distance.
Chrysafis’s trail cam images have an interesting side-effect, he said: they make it apparent that humans are one part of a larger community of animals. When Chrysafis flips through the pictures from a trail cam on a property in the Sierra foothills, they show a trail runner whip by, then a bevy of quail, then a bobcat, dog walker, coyote, mountain lion and finally a family with a picnic basket. “If you’ve been on that little trail,” Chrysafis said, “you have been on the same trail that 90% of California’s mammals have been on. It’s just such a cool thing to think about.”
Wildlife appears on trails for the same reasons we do: they’re easier to walk on than pushing through undergrowth. Human and wildlife populations are drawn to the same things; our conflicts with each other boil down to the fundamental animal tensions over water, food and space. Seeing it that way makes it easier to choose deterrence over retaliatory killing. “We don’t live in isolation from wildlife and nature,” said Wilhite. “We are part of it.”
Last year, a rancher in Fresno county lost two sheep; their deep neck wounds pointed to a mountain lion. Coexistence seemed unlikely, but Chrysafis recommended deterrents and set up cams. His cameras caught a mature female mountain lion haunting the rancher’s property once or twice a week. A few months after Chrysafis’s visit, the rancher sent him an email with a photo attached: a trail cam shot of his mountain lion, caught mid-stride on a high ridge above the ranch. “It’s a great picture and I want to frame it,” he wrote. “Is that OK with you?” So far, that mountain lion hasn’t taken a third sheep.