Washington’s 482 mountain lion records trace the forested mountain country on both sides of the Cascade crest. Whatcom, Clallam, and Pend Oreille counties lead the list, which is to say the North Cascades, the Olympics, and the Selkirk edge, and state resource management lands together with the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness hold the heaviest site counts.
A stalking cat of timbered, broken ground
The mountain lion kills deer and elk from cover, not from open pursuit, so it lives where steep, brushy, or forested terrain lets it get close. Washington supplies that from the rain forests around Olympic National Park to the drier pine country of the Okanogan, and lions use nearly all of it, including timbered foothills within easy reach of the state’s urban corridor.
No off season
Counts run nearly level all year, from a low of 21 in August to a high of 49 in March, because a lion neither hibernates nor migrates. It is on the landscape in every month and still almost never seen. Most encounters with Washington lions are encounters with their sign: tracks in mud or snow, a scraped-up scratch pile, a deer carcass cached under duff.
Status in Washington
NatureServe ranks the mountain lion S4, Apparently Secure, in Washington, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
