San Francisco Mountain Lion Is Tranquilized and Captured for Release Elsewhere

San Francisco officials have tranquilized and captured a mountain lion that’s been wandering the Pacific Heights neighborhood in recent days.

The San Francisco Fire Department, along with police, the Department of Animal Care and Control, the San Francisco Zoo and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, cornered the young cougar in a courtyard between two apartment buildings on California Street early Tuesday.

Fire officials confirmed the cat had been shot with a tranquilizer just after 10:30 a.m.

Animal Care and Control said the year-old male was tranquilized by the zoo’s chief veterinarian, Dr. Adrian Mutlow, and a CDFW biologist. Officials were seen transporting the cat out of the courtyard in a metal crate belonging to the state wildlife department.

“The lion will be released to a more suitable habitat,” the department said in a statement.

California Street between Octavia and Laguna streets, just one block south of Lafayette Park in Lower Pacific Heights, was shut down for hours Tuesday morning, after the Fire Department said it had received reports of the mountain lion spotted nearby just after 5:30 a.m.

The cat was first caught on video footage near the same park overnight Sunday. Animal control officials believe it got lost while dispersing from its mother.

According to Alys Granados, a wildlife ecologist with the Bay Area Puma Project, mountain lions dwell in open spaces south of the city. In recent years, multiple young cats have ended up in San Francisco after getting lost while dispersing — or separating — from their mothers when they reach an independent age, usually between 1 and 2 years old.

“These young animals, newly away from mom, just get lost and end up in the city,” she said. “They just move north a bit from the peninsula, and then they don’t really know what to do. They get confused, and they just kind of hunker down for like a day or two, which is kind of what we saw with this lion.”

She said the cats are ending up in the city more commonly because there’s less undisturbed habitat down south.

“This population is not doing well,” Granados told KQED, adding that the Central Coast mountain lion is currently a candidate for the endangered species list. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is expected to decide whether to place the species on the list permanently next month.

There’s “so much encroachment around the remaining habitat that there’s no park or protected area that’s big enough to have the full home range size of a mountain lion, which can be anywhere from like 20 square miles up to even 100 square miles,” Granados continued.

Since early Monday, city residents have seen the mountain lion roaming the neighborhood around Lafayette Park, mostly between dusk and dawn hours. Roxanne Blank alerted animal control after she said she’d had a staredown with the cat in the early hours of Monday morning, a few blocks away in Cow Hollow.

She said when she went to walk up the stairs to her apartment around 3 a.m., it was on her porch.

“I just locked eyes with the mountain lion for over five minutes. We just really stared at each other,” Blank told KQED. “It was huge. When it was on all fours, it was like two-thirds the size of the compost bin next to it.”

Blank said after a few minutes, her dog began to bark and scared the cat off. But it left behind huge claw marks she discovered the following morning.

The city’s Recreation and Park department closed the park temporarily on Monday to conduct a sweep but reopened it in the evening, after finding no signs of a mountain lion.

On Monday evening, city officials reported a sighting close to Pacific Avenue and Octavia Street, and another near the park early Tuesday morning.

The last known mountain lion sighting in San Francisco was in 2021.

KQED’s Tam Vu contributed to this report.