New Mexico Department of Game and Fish officers darted, sedated and captured a cougar Wednesday that had been traveling through Santa Fe neighborhoods.

The 150-pound adult male mountain lion ended up in an apple tree in the backyard of a house off Siringo Road and Calle Navidad, a couple of miles from where the big cat was spotted Tuesday by residents.

Brandon Griffith of the state Department of Game and Fish said he was sure it was the same cat. "They tracked the lion through the snow yesterday, and it left blood on the snow from an injured right front paw," Griffith said.

Griffith said the cougar darted Wednesday morning had an injured right front paw, and the size of the paws matched tracks found earlier in the Don Gaspar neighborhood.

The mountain lion was in good shape and "very well fed," Griffith said.

On Wednesday, department spokesman Marty Frentzel said the cat would be seen by a veterinarian for minor injuries before being released into the Carson National Forest the same day.

The animal was considered a good candidate for release because it had displayed fear of humans in every encounter.

Game and Fish biologist Rick Winslow said relocating lions isn't always a perfect solution because they can be killed by more dominate animals in their new homes or hit by cars.

Kina Murphy, a program director at the Earth Works Institute, said the nonprofit will offer a series of workshops later this spring to educate people about co-existing with wild animals.

The Department of Game and Fish advises people who encounter mountain lions to stay calm, back away slowly if possible and fight back if attacked.

Long term, Murphy said, keeping wild animals afraid of people is one of the main ways to protect them from having to be relocated or killed.

"Every time you see one, you have to scare it away," Murphy said. "You have to be aggressive about scaring it away and not just sort of stay in your house and watch it go by, even though that's the natural thing to want to do because we all think it's cool to see them. It is cool, but it's not really cool and exciting when it's too close to your house. If we don't deter them from the very beginning, we are going to have all sorts of incidents, and the result is going to be that a whole lot of wildlife is going to get killed."

Winslow said there are more than 30 different names for the mountain lions — including cougar, puma and panther — which are interchangeable. Frentzel said he prefers to use cougar. Researchers in the field are trying to standardize the use of puma, according to Winslow. The word puma — which comes from a Peruvian Indian language called Quechua — is one of the oldest used to refer to the animal.

Regardless of what you call him, the lion caught by Game and Fish on Wednesday has captured the interest of Santa Fe residents.

Galisteo Basin resident Susan Murphy said she began writing a screenplay several months ago about what she sees as an increase in lion-human confrontations based on what she's heard from friends and neighbors.

"There is a neighborhood in town that has been seeing a mountain lion but not telling Game and Fish because they don't want anyone to hurt their lion," said Murphy, who is not related to Kina Murphy.

The neighbor of a man who lives on Griffin Street provided a photograph of a mountain lion that leapt an 8-foot fence into the man's yard about 10 days ago before leaping back out and disappearing into a nearby arroyo.

Officials at Santa Fe High School warned students to be extra cautious Wednesday morning because cougar prints were found on campus. Someone has even started a twitter account, "SFMountainLion."

Contact Phaedra Haywood at 986-3068 or phaywood@sfnewmexican.com.

Game and Fish spokesman Dan Williams said the agency got a call from a resident who saw the lion in the area of Don Gaspar Avenue and Cordova Road Tuesday morning.

Department wildlife biologists saw the lion about an hour later, but couldn't catch it.

"It appeared to know its way around the neighborhood and was able to give them the slip pretty easily," Williams said.

Williams said the biologists did track the cat Tuesday through some alleys and backyards and got a good enough look at it to determine it is probably a healthy, mature animal weighing about 150 pounds.

He said tracks of various ages indicate the big cat may have been living in the neighborhood — which has many trees and bushes — for "a while."

"I wouldn't be surprised if some people are missing their cats or little dogs," Williams said. Mountain lions "will eat anything smaller than them. They prefer deer, but they will eat other things."

Williams said it's likely the mountain lion was lured down out of the mountains by deer who came to lower elevations during heavy snowstorms.