City Dwellers in a Desert Get Some Frequent Wild Guests

Judy Stern’s voice still trembles when she talks about the night in October when a mountain lion showed up in her back yard.

“I was sitting on the patio doing my banking statement when I looked up, and there he was, half in and half out of my swimming pool,” says Stern, who divides her time between Tucson and Buffalo, N.Y. “It was right in front of me, and I never heard a sound. It was just there, drinking out of the pool and watching me. . . . “

Stern, who wears a leg prosthesis, struggled out of her chair and backed toward the patio door, phone in hand. She called her parents. “Ah, dad,” she said, “I have this big cat in my yard.”

Stern’s father called for help while she watched the animal patrol the pool deck, rest for a bit in a pail of water and leave as quietly as he came, slinking through the wrought-iron fence and into the darkness of the Catalina Mountain foothills.

Stern’s close encounter occurred after several other lion sightings. On a trail on the city’s far East Side a lion simply stepped from the brush in front of a group of hikers. In Green Valley, a retirement community south of Tucson, golfers have seen the big cats strolling across fairways.

Wildlife experts point out that Tucson is a growing city smack in the middle of the Sonoran desert, surrounded by mountains and public lands.

“If you want to live in the foothills on an acre and a half with desert landscaping, you’re going to have to share your house with unexpected guests,” says Bob Miles, spokesman for Arizona Game and Fish.

Tucson may be the nation’s leader in nerve-racking faceoffs with wild animals of all sorts. One of the most plentiful is the javelina, a half-blind, pig-like animal that roams the desert in large numbers.

Known locally for chewing up flower beds and dining on pet’s food, javelina usually don’t attack people. But they’ll charge if cornered.

Rattlesnakes are everywhere, too. John Karolzak, chief of the Rural/Metro Fire Department, says his agency gets 10 to 12 calls a day during the summer to remove rattlers from homes.

Gila monsters are a close second. These big lizards run from 12 to 18 inches long and have a particularly nasty way of showing their temper. “They’ll latch onto your arm and grind with their upper and lower jaws while they release this poison,” says Karolzak. “You can’t rip them off without taking the skin too.”

He offers three recommendations for getting free of a Gila monster’s grip: Jump into a swimming pool, light a match under its chin, or stick a pen up its nose.

Coyotes are tougher to deal with, and their numbers seem to be growing. A recent study found five per square kilometer in neighborhoods adjacent to the Saguaro National Monument on Tucson’s East Side.

“There’s a lot of low-density housing out on the fringes of the city, and that’s a good habitat for coyotes and other animals,” says Bill Shaw, a wildlife biologist at the University of Arizona. “They live a good life out there.”

But coyotes are not confined to Tucson’s edges. They’re everywhere, including downtown. Miles recently saw one walking along the sidewalk near the university. “It reached the crosswalk, waited for the light to change and kept going,” he says.