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. One woman 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.
“Early this morning, while getting dropped off by a friend, I witnessed a majestic mountain lion trotting down my block and up the steps to a corridor next to my apartment,” the woman, whose name on Instagram is Roxanne, posted along with a video showing the mountain lion standing atop an apartment stairwell. “It was HUGE! Must have weighed 100+ pounds, and when on all fours, it was about 2/3 the height of the compost bin.”
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.