The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission will consider reducing the number of permits for the next mountain lion hunting season. 

While the regular mountain lion season is underway — and will run through March 2025 — the changes would impact the following season from 2025 to 2026. 

Parks and Wildlife staff recommends that the commission reduce the number of licenses from 674 this year to 610 across the state during its annual review, according to a memo for the upcoming Thursday, Jan. 9 meeting. The reduction comes from both the northwest and eastern management units in an effort to maintain stable populations of lions. 

Staff is also recommending that the state not offer an additional April hunting season — something that the agency has been able to offer since 2014. The regular lion hunting season runs from November, following the conclusion of the annual elk and deer seasons, through March 31. 

Colorado is home to between 3,800 to 4,400 mountain lions, Parks and Wildlife estimates. The agency uses hunting as one of the primary management tools, according to its most recent lion management plans for the western and eastern parts of the state. These plans were enacted in 2021 and 2024. 

In the last full hunting season, from 2023-2024, 500 lions — 265 male lions and 235 females (both adult and sub-adult) — were harvested across the state, slightly above the three-year annual average of 491. 

Both plans set two new, independent thresholds that, if met, could impact the number of hunting licenses issued each hunting season. 

This includes a limit on the number of adult female lions hunted each year — setting it at 22% of the population. It also places a cap on human-caused mortality — which are lion deaths outside of hunting, including vehicle collisions and livestock conflicts — so it cannot exceed 17% of the population over a three-year average. Either threshold, independently triggered, would cause a reduction in the number of hunting licenses issued. 

Looking at the 2025-2026 season, the staff memo reports that only one of these thresholds was exceeded. In 2023-2024, the number of adult females hunted exceeded the 22% limit, hitting 24%, in the western hunting region. 

This threshold for adult female lions was put in place to provide an “effective safeguard against excessive removal against the part of the population that contributes to growth” and ensure lion populations remain stable, according to comments made by Mark Vieira, the agency’s carnivore and furbearer program manager, at the commission’s November meeting.

Whether hunting mountain lions as well as bobcats is ethical or necessary has been questioned by the public for the past few years. The issue came to a head during November’s election when Colorado voters were asked to ban the hunting of mountain lions, bobcats and lynx. While the measure failed — with nearly 55% of voters against it — wildlife advocates continued to press Parks and Wildlife commissioners to make changes at its November meeting while hunters and others supported the agency’s management direction. 

Outside of an outright ban, commenters also pressed the agency to consider disallowing the use of hounds for hunting mountain lions — the primary method used today — as well as crackdown on the number of females hunted.    

The annual review of mountain lion hunting licenses — as well as other hunting seasons and licenses including deer, elk, pronghorn, moose, bighorn sheep and bear — will be discussed at the commission’s meeting on Thursday, Jan. 9 in Denver.