Mountain lions prowling beyond usual Western range
Skeptix
By DENNIS CAUCHON
USA TODAY
Larry Johnson was driving to a movie with his wife in June when he saw
something he never expected to see in a national park near the shores of
Lake Michigan -- a mountain lion.
The cougar was crossing Highway 22, gliding smoothly and confidently as if
on roller blades. It disappeared into a patch of red pine trees, not far
from a house and a mailbox.
"I knew immediately what it was," says Johnson, a National Park Service
ranger who has worked at seven parks over 21 years and now serves as the
chief ranger at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in
Michigan. "Still, you ask yourself: Could it really be what I think it
is?"
Mountain lions aren't supposed to exist in the wild within 1,000 miles of
this national park, located in the northwest part of Michigan's lower
peninsula. These ferocious predators -- also called cougars, panthers,
pumas, catamounts and other names were hunted into extinction in most
Eastern and Midwestern states during the 1800s and early 1900s.
The animal's only known habitat since about 1900 has been Western states
and southwest Florida, where 50 to 100 panthers survive.
But the mountain lion is moving east again, expanding its territory for
the first time in a century. More than two dozen mountain lions have been
killed or photographed outside the animal's normal range since
2000. Examples:
In eastern Nebraska last month, Elidia Valdivia found a mountain lion
asleep in a tree as she loaded her kids into her minivan for a ride to
school. A conservation officer killed the animal in South Sioux City.
In Iowa, three mountain lions have been killed since 2000 -- the first
cougars confirmed there since 1867.
In Illinois, a train killed a male cougar on July 15, 2000, in Randolph
County, near the Mississippi River, about 70 miles south of St. Louis. It
was that state's first documented wild cougar in more than 135 years and
the only confirmed mountain lion east of the Mississippi River, excluding
Florida panthers.
It's unclear why the mountain lion is moving east.
The cougar population appears to be growing in the West, and young males
are seeking new territory, says David Maehr, an authority on mountain
lions at the University of Kentucky.
Mountain lions are thriving because deer and elk -- the cougar's main prey
-- have grown in numbers while competing predators -- wolves and bears --
are struggling. Wildlife management and residential development in Western
states have played an important role in creating this cougar-friendly
environment.
Also, California voters in 1990 outlawed hunting mountain lions. However,
the cougar is hunted in other Western states. Colorado hunters kill about
400 mountain lions every year.
There is no reliable national estimate of the number of cougars because
they are such a reclusive, solitary animal, but state wildlife officials
say the number exceeds 10,000.
Mountain lion madness
The migration of mountain lions eastward has met with a mixed
reaction. Many wildlife officials, hunters and environmentalists are
excited by the return of the powerful animal to more of the nation's
wilderness.
But, as Westerners know, humans and mountain lions have an uneasy
relationship. Mountain lions sometimes wander into residential
neighborhoods in California, Colorado and other Western states. They can
kill pets, livestock and humans.
The Mountain Lion Foundation says 18 people have been killed by cougars in
the last 100 years. In Orange County, Calif., south of Los Angeles, a
mountain biker was killed and another injured by a mountain lion in
January. Police in Palo Alto, Calif., killed a mountain lion in a
residential neighborhood in May.
The fear of mountain lions can be great, even when the risk is relatively
small.
"Mountain lion mania is out of control here," says Ron Andrews, an Iowa
Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist. "People are afraid to
take their morning walk. They won't camp. They're afraid for their
livestock. People are being held hostage, even though the risk is minute."
Mountain lions -- real and imagined -- have captured the American
imagination for centuries. Wildlife biologists say reports of mountain
lions have soared in the last few years, but they dismiss most sightings
as urban legends, akin to reports of the legendary Bigfoot, a giant, hairy
animal said to exist in the Pacific Northwest and other regions.
"We get hundreds and hundreds of mountain lion sightings from the public
every years, and 99.999 percent turn out to be something else," says
biologist Dave Hamilton, head of the mountain lion response team for the
Missouri Department of Conservation. "It's usually dogs, house cats,
bobcats. A third of the sightings are for black panthers, which don't
exist in North America."
Missouri officials have confirmed just six wild mountain lions since 1994,
plus one cougar that was an escaped pet, Hamilton says. But the frequency
and location of the lions is surprising even the experts: Two wild cougars
were killed by cars in 2003, including one on a busy highway four miles
from downtown Kansas City.
Mountain lions have been reported in the last year in such unlikely places
as the suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Columbus,
Ohio. Wildlife biologists are skeptical, especially of reports of lions
east of the Mississippi River, but they are hesitant to dismiss them
entirely. The Mississippi River is a barrier to a large cat -- but not an
insurmountable one, biologists say.
"I told a reporter from Peoria that reports of mountain lions in Illinois
were crazy," says wildlife biologist Bob Bluett of the Illinois Department
of Natural Resources. "I said, 'Show me the money. Show me the body.'
Three weeks later, one got hit by a train. I had to eat my words."Young
cats spread out
A typical male mountain lion controls 50 to 300 square miles, depending on
how plentiful food is. He will allow a few females on his turf but will
not accept male intruders. Even a mountain lion's male children must leave
between the ages of 14 and 24 months, or the father will kill them.
Most cougars found east of the traditional habitat are young males,
seeking their own territory, where they will be the top predator, feasting
on about 10 pounds of deer, porcupine and other wildlife every day.
New research shows that mountain lions will travel enormous distances. In
May, a mountain lion wearing a radio tracking collar was killed by a train
near Red Rock, Okla. The animal had traveled 661 miles, as the crow flies,
in 266 days from the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was twice as far as
earlier research had indicated the cats would travel.
"It tells us they can move long distances in relatively short periods, and
that extends their range considerably," says Jonathan Jenks, a University
of South Dakota researcher who tracks the animals.
Jenks says it is unclear whether mountain lions have established new
populations outside their traditional range or whether a small number of
young males are simply straying farther.
At least 50 cats are probably needed to create a population that
reproduces itself, Jenks says. South Dakota has 127 to 149 mountain lions
living in about 3,200 square miles of the Black Hills. California has
4,000 to 6,000 mountain lions that roam about half the state. Colorado has
about 3,500. Arizona has 2,500.
Genetic tests have shown that all mountain lions -- from Florida to
California -- are the same species.
At Sleeping Bear Dunes, the National Park Service has put up signs warning
people about mountain lions, although Johnson's sighting and another by a
park volunteer have not been confirmed. "Remain calm," the signs say. "Do
not run. Pick up small children."
Michigan state wildlife officials are not convinced that mountain lions
have returned to the state.
"We've had some fairly credible sightings, but we haven't had a documented
kill of a mountain lion in 90 years," says Ray Rustum, supervisor of the
state's natural heritage wildlife office.
Park rangers at Sleeping Bear Dunes have set up motion-triggered cameras
next to animal carcasses in an attempt to photograph a mountain lion.
If they succeed, Michigan would be the 10th -- and easternmost -- state to
confirm the return of the mountain lion to an area where the animal had
been hunted out of existence.
"We don't want to scare people," Johnson says. "But people should have a
healthy respect for the animal."
B.A.Erlebacher
In article <cp26g3$m...@luna.vcn.bc.ca>,
Skeptix wrote:
>Published in the Asbury Park Press 12/05/04
>By DENNIS CAUCHON
>USA TODAY
>Larry Johnson was driving to a movie with his wife in June when he saw
>something he never expected to see in a national park near the shores of
>Lake Michigan -- a mountain lion.
>Mountain lions aren't supposed to exist in the wild within 1,000 miles of
>this national park, located in the northwest part of Michigan's lower
>peninsula. These ferocious predators -- also called cougars, panthers,
>pumas, catamounts and other names were hunted into extinction in most
>Eastern and Midwestern states during the 1800s and early 1900s.
Americans often forget that Canada exists, and animals have no need to
respect the international border.
There are small remnant populations of eastern cougars in northern
Ontario and Quebec as well as New Brunswick, with occasional reliable
sightings over many decades, although the animals are usually seen only
in the least populated areas (which are vast and very thinly populated
indeed).
Recent sightings of cougars in New England are probably animals from
the New Brunswick population. Abandoned farms and other formerly
cleared areas returning to forest are very productive of prey for these
large felids, and the extirpation of wolves from the area leaves them
free of competitors.
The cougar sighting in northwestern Michigan could be a migrant from
the Ontario boreal forest population.
As for "ferocious", like any animal, they are just trying to make a
living.
Wild felids are very secretive animals, and each requires a large
territory. You can live in an area with a population of lynxes for
years, for example, and never see one or its tracks, unless one gets
rabies and loses its caution. So if cougars are re-expanding their
range now that predation by humans has stopped, their competitors are
extirpated, and human activity favours abundant prey for them, they
could go quite far and become very numerous before there are many
sightings. And young males seeking to establish their own territory
have been documented to travel hundreds of miles in a few months.
It's not clear to me why this article is posted to a skeptics list.
Cougars aren't sasquatches. They are known to be migrating back into
their former ranges. This sighting in Michigan, while unusual, was
made by an experienced observer, a park ranger, and is quite likely
to be valid.
Dan Fingerman
>
> It's not clear to me why this article is posted to a skeptics list.
> Cougars aren't sasquatches. They are known to be migrating back into
> their former ranges. This sighting in Michigan, while unusual, was
> made by an experienced observer, a park ranger, and is quite likely
> to be valid.
Many of the mountain lion sighting reports from the eastern U.S. have a
cryptozoological flavor -- especially from the "early" sightings (late 1990s
and early 2000s). The responses from many state and federal agencies charged
with managing parks, wildlife, and the like are also interesting. They were
outright dismissive at first, but we are seeing a shift toward something more
like cautious optimism.
The contrast to "classical" cryptozoology is also noteworthy. We have a
growing body of tangible evidence -- photographs and carcasses -- to
substantiate the mountain lion sightings, whereas Bigfoot has yet to pose for
a single undisputed snapshot or let his dead body be found.
For a really detailed explanation, search the list archives for coyotes and
Nashville.
--
DTM :<|
www.danfingerman.com
Ske...@cyberwarped.com
> From: "Dan Fingerman" <fing...@aya.yale.edu>
>
>On Tue, December 7, 2004 11:31 pm, B.A.Erlebacher said:
>>
>> It's not clear to me why this article is posted to a skeptics list.
>> Cougars aren't sasquatches. They are known to be migrating back into
>> their former ranges. This sighting in Michigan, while unusual, was
>> made by an experienced observer, a park ranger, and is quite likely
>> to be valid.
>
>Many of the mountain lion sighting reports from the eastern U.S. have a
>cryptozoological flavor -- especially from the "early" sightings (late 1990s
>and early 2000s). The responses from many state and federal agencies charged
>with managing parks, wildlife, and the like are also interesting. They were
>outright dismissive at first, but we are seeing a shift toward something more
>like cautious optimism.
>
>The contrast to "classical" cryptozoology is also noteworthy. We have a
>growing body of tangible evidence -- photographs and carcasses -- to
>substantiate the mountain lion sightings, whereas Bigfoot has yet to pose for
>a single undisputed snapshot or let his dead body be found.
Cougars in Illinois?
Quite a few sane and sensible citizens have concluded that Felis concolor
dwells here again
Essay by James Krohe Jr.
Democratic governors came back to Illinois — why not cougars? Officially,
Illinois has no wild cougars; the cougar is not listed as an endangered
species in Illinois for the simple reason that a species can’t be
endangered if it doesn’t exist. Donald Hoffmeister, former director of the
University of Illinois’ Museum of Natural History, who authored what
amounts to the Debrett’s of Illinois mammalia, reports that cougars were
probably exterminated in Illinois before 1870. Today the only cougars in
Illinois are kept in zoos and in people’s homes, illegally, as pets.
Or are they? Quite a few sane and sensible citizens have concluded that
the cougar dwells here again. More than 150 cougar sightings have been
reported in Illinois since 1950, according to the Eastern Puma Research
Network.
Cougars, or things that look like cougars, have been seen in as many
places in Illinois in recent years as presidential candidates. In DeKalb
County in 1990, some law enforcement authorities blamed a big cat for
killing farm animals. Security staff at Fort Sheridan on Chicago’s North
Shore were sent on a wild cat chase in 1993 after a cougar sighting
there. Multiple sightings were logged in and around Edwardsville in 1998,
including at the local campus of Southern Illinois University — the home,
as it happens, of the Cougars — and along Macoupin Creek near Carlinville
in ’03 and ’04. In deep southern Illinois, cougars would seem to be as
common along some back roads as pickup trucks.
The most recent spate of sightings began just after the new year in far
northeast Illinois. Large wild animals were driven out of suburban Lake
County long ago — the area’s real estate prices would make a badger weep —
but so far in 2004 some 50 residents have reported cougar-like
critters. Typical was the report of at least one and maybe two cougars
trespassing on a back yard in Antioch, crossing a
forest preserve bicycle path and crouching, presumably with intent, at the
edge of a cornfield.
It is rare to see any new firm set up shop in Illinois without a tax
incentive. If a company of cougar has done so, it confirms what our
pioneer forebears knew about its resourcefulness and its
independence. Physically, Felis concolor is an admirable creature. The
cougar is not a huge animal — even a strapping adult male would not make
the offensive line of most high school football teams — and it has little
endurance in the chase. But the cat is astonishingly agile, strong and
quick, which is why so many sports teams in the state hopefully nicknamed
themselves the Cougars or the Panthers.
The big cat once could be found everywhere in the state. Solitary in
habit, the cat usually hunts at night, and was usually heard rather than
seen. (Its peculiar scream is hair-raising.) Frontier memoirist Eliza
Farnham reported that while a panther was occasionally found in the deep
forest along the creek bottoms of Tazewell County when she lived there in
the 1840s, none ever ventured onto the open prairies. When cat did meet
human, the results — at least the results that were remembered and written
about — were often bloody. The pioneer annals of life around McKee Creek
in Montgomery County tell of a youth snatched off his pony and killed and
partly devoured by a cat. A more typical ending was engineered by one
William Huffmaster who lived on Lick Creek in Sangamon County’s Loami
Township. He and a neighbor are said to have treed an animal they knew as
a panther; while the neighbor left to fetch a gun, Huffmaster, with the
help of his dogs, caught the animal and clubbed it to death.
As one might expect in a creature that ranges across the whole of the
continent, the cougar has picked up a lot of names, including catamount,
painter, mountain lion and puma. In ye olde Illinois, the big cats were
known almost universally as panthers. That era is recalled in the place
names left behind by the state’s first Euro-Americans. Illinois has no
landscape feature officially named after the cougar, but the mappers of
the U.S. Geological Survey list more than a dozen “Panther Creeks” along
with their forks and branches, plus a Panther Grove, a Panther Hollow and
a Panther Den.
Today, oddly, the animal is described by the media and government agencies
as the cougar, a name that is of Indian origin. “Cougar” seems to be
preferred by the wildlife experts who usually provide reporters with
informed opinion, possibly to avoid confusion with the leopards of Asia
and Africa, which are also known as panthers. “Panther” has always been
the commonest usage in the American South, and the early reference for the
term in Illinois no doubt owes to the Southern origin of so many of the
state’s settlers. The cat is still popularly known as the panther in
southern Illinois, too; the word shift means that Illinois may be
recovering a bit of its four-legged pioneer heritage as it loses a bit of
its linguistic one.
To conclude that cougars are again resident in Illinois, however, is to
get ahead of the facts. Not all the animals reported as cougars are
cougars, and not all the cougars sighted may be wild cougars, and not all
the wild cougars sighted are members of breeding
populations. The Eastern Cougar Network, a nonprofit wildlife research
organization whose staff zoologist is Clay Nielsen of Southern Illinois
university at Carbondale, confirms just one cougar in Illinois. No doubt
many, even most, of the sightings owe to poor eyesight, confusion — it
acquired the name “mountain lion,” after all, from settlers who mistook it
for a female African lion — or over-keen imagin-ations. One of the last
belongs to usinessman Virgil Smith of Harrisburg, who for years insisted
that 250 to 300 cougars are living wild in Illinois as a result of a
secret cougar release program run by state and federal officials. There is
no such program, although to the conspiracy-minded, the fact that a
government agency denies it is ipso facto proof of the story’s
accuracy. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources for years publicly
demanded that Smith offer either evidence for his claims or an apology but
received neither.
The secret government cougar is not the only subspecies of that cat
thought to be prowling Illinois. Parts of the state seem to be suffering a
plague of black panthers, which hereabouts means not leopards (the only
true black panther) but the black or melanistic form of the cougar. The
Eastern Puma Research Network, not to be confused with the science-based
Eastern Cougar Network, calculated that up to a third of more than 600
cougar sightings in the eastern United States from 1983 to 1989 involved
black panthers — a much higher proportion than in the western United
States. In Illinois, the incidence was even higher; a majority of the
sightings made around Shawnee National Forest in that period were
of black animals. In Decatur, farther north, so many black panthers have
been spotted since the 1950s that the city has become famous among
paranormals, who regard a black cat that can weigh up to 160 pounds as the
Cadillac Escalade of portents.
The problem is, it is not certain that the cougar has a melanistic form,
at least in North America. Black pumas are known in South America, where
the pet cougars sold in this country originate. That raises the
possibility that people are seeing escaped or released pets. But pet black
cougars would have to be as commonplace in Illinois as cocker spaniels to
explain so many sightings over so many years.
The mystery cats attracted to Illinois a member of Britain’s Centre for
Fortean Zoology, which calls itself
the only professional, scientific and full-time organization in the world
dedicated to cryptozoology, or the study of unknown animals. His
investigation, like all such investigations, came to no conclusion. Dozens
of sightings have yielded very few bits of indisputable forensic evidence
of the animal’s presence, such as pawprints or scat, which is why skeptics
lump the Illinois black panther with other mythic creatures such as
Bigfoot and the compassionate conservative.
There seems little doubt that most of the animals perceived as cougars,
whatever their color, are probably coyotes or feral dogs. In 1986, sleepy
residents of a Waukegan apartment complex reported a lion on the
premises; the animal turned out to be an escaped junkyard dog whose owner
had given him a lion-type haircut to scare off prowlers. One of this
year’s sightings in Lake County — reported by a woman who called police to
tell them she was trailing a cougar by car near the town of Wadsworth —
turned out to be a coyote. And examination of at least three sets of
suspect pawprints collected during the most recent Lake County hoo-ha led
wildlife experts to declare them those of a canine.
Plenty of credible witnesses remain convinced that what they have seen was
no dog. Most experts reply that while there may indeed be cougars out
there, they are merely escaped or abandoned pets or circus animals. It can
be assumed that many cougars are being kept as pets or in makeshift zoos
in Illinois, as are other exotic creatures that could easily be mistaken
for cougars. That such animals sometimes escape was confirmed in 2000 and
2001 when two former pet cougars were found by Department of Natural
Resources staff roaming downstate Illinois.
Ecologists may find the distinction between a wild cougar and an escaped
or abandoned pet to be essential, but it may strike many people as
meaningless. A cougar is a cougar, and if it is at large and living
successfully in the wild, it is, for all practical purposes, a wild
animal. A hiker who is having her arm chewed off by a big cat will find
the question of whether it is a released pet from the South American
genetic line or a migrant into Illinois from North American wild stock to
be interesting but, under the circumstances, not very urgent.
Twenty years ago it was reasonable to assume that any big cat found in
Illinois had to have been carried into it in a box. But 20 years of
enlightened green policies since then have left the midcontinent
crisscrossed with wild-ish places that serve as stepping stones on which
animals can safely cross
otherwise inhospitable terrain. Illinois offers plenty of habitat in the
forests of southern Illinois or the wooded river valleys. Even in suburban
Lake County, a big cat would find 25,000 acres of forest in preserves
along the Des Plaines River and plentiful food in the form of
deer; indeed, Lake County would be to a hungry cat what a government job
used to be for humans.
That some cats are exploring this part of the Midwest is known. In 2000, a
cougar was killed by a train in
Randolph County. Wildlife experts at Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale who examined its carcass found that the animal showed no signs
of captive rearing. It had the remnants of a deer fawn in its belly, not
pet food, and its DNA confirmed it to have been of North American origin
rather than of South American stock, as would be true of an escaped or
released pet. Investigators reporting the finding in the Transactions of
the Illinois State Academy of Science described it as “the first confirmed
occurrence of a cougar in Illinois in over 100 years.”
It is hard to imagine that this unlucky cat is the only cougar to find
life in Illinois to its liking. The species is wide-ranging, and for years
has been slowly recolonizing parts of North America from which it was
driven long ago. Migrants from established populations in Canada and the
western United States have penetrated the Great Plains, the upper Midwest
and the East. (Cougars moving south from the Black Hills have popped up in
Nebraska, for example.) The known cougar populations closest to Illinois
are in Texas and Colorado. The Eastern Cougar Network has confirmed seven
cougars in Missouri and three in Iowa. Cougars may also have set up shop,
as it were,
in the Arkansas Ozarks and in eastern Kentucky. To an animal that can
cover a hundred miles in a day, this is just up the street.
One stray cat in Randolph County does not prove the presence of breeding
populations of wild cougars, but if the big cats are not yet permanent
residents, it seems inevitable that they will be soon.
What then for state and local government policy? For decades it has been
general policy to protect most of Illinois’ remnant wildlife from
people. The fruit of that policy is the return to Illinois of large wild
animals of more types than the state has seen in more than a
century. River otters again grace its large rivers, and bobcats are making
life interesting for small animals in some forests. Coyotes are as common
in Illinois as highway potholes, and beavers are again re-engineering the
state’s waterways. Deer are so plentiful that many suburban gardeners
would welcome the help of a hungry cougar to teach them manners.
But while such critters are wild they are not very wild — not like the
wolf or bear or cougar. The renewed
presence of these large predators will force authorities to ponder how to
protect people from wildlife for the first time since the days when the
state paid its citizens a bounty for every wolf they killed. Recent fatal
attacks by cougars on adult humans in the West shocked wildlife experts as
well as residents because all their textbooks had insisted the cougar is a
timid creature in the presence of people. Modern hunting bans, however,
have created generations of animals that have lost much of their fear of
humans. A policy of protecting animals may be making people more
vulnerable.
As long as cougars don’t try to turn property owners into prey, the larger
public seems likely to remain less afraid than curious. In Lake County,
when the scent of cougars is in the air, the county has warned residents
to keep pets inside the house. But the sudden appearance of an elegant and
exotic creature in a part of the state not famous for either elegance or
exoticism is diverting, if only because it gives everyone something to
talk about with the neighbors other than traffic jams around Gurnee.
In this they could not differ more from the region’s pioneer forebears,
who would have reached for a rifle if they saw a cougar. Today, residents
are likely to reach for the video camera. This may mark us not as braver
than our ancestors, merely less experienced. In a world in which we enjoy
an unnatural absence of danger from wild beasts, our natural fear of big
cats has been misplaced. Today we know them only from the sanitized images
from TV wildlife documentaries and the zombie-ized specimens trapped in
zoos. We no longer appreciate their wildness or their strength.
Is our collective fear of wild animals really gone? Or is it merely
forgotten, tucked away in our mental attics because we no longer need it
in an Illinois in which the only predators most of us face are on the
highways? “Once we were as hunted as rabbits,
as vulnerable as mice,” wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Bill Stokes in
1991, “and perhaps therein is the reason for our perverted fascination
with the untamed unknown. In the deepest recesses of our being, maybe we
hark back with an odd nostalgia to a time when there were cougars staring
at us from the darkness of the forests.”
Nostalgia? Not quite. But the prospect of meeting a dangerous wild animal
makes us momentarily alive again in a way that our pampered existence
seldom requires. That alone may be reason enough to welcome them back to
Illinois.
-------------
James Krohe Jr., a veteran commentator on Illinois public issues, is
writing a guide to the state’s history and culture for the Illinois
Humanities Council.
Illinois Issues, July/August 2004
Garrison Hilliard
>It's not clear to me why this article is posted to a skeptics list.
>Cougars aren't sasquatches. They are known to be migrating back into
>their former ranges. This sighting in Michigan, while unusual, was
>made by an experienced observer, a park ranger, and is quite likely
>to be valid.
Then try http://www.bigcats.org/abc/catspecies/blackpumas.html then.