Untangling what factors influenced cougars’ potential recolonization of the Midwest became my research focus in graduate school.

However, we couldn’t point to a single reason for this new trend. One hypothesis was most plausible: dispersal by young adult males from the West. For the most part, individual cougars are nearly indistinguishable, their tracks particularly so, and with the rare exception of a collared animal, DNA testing is the only way to learn about the identity and source population of any cougar. Given that much of the evidence for these animals’ presence in places they shouldn’t be had come from photos or tracks-and given that the use of DNA for forensics and research was still in its infancy-these were pretty good questions. Why were we seeing a handful of cats in the Midwest? Were exotic pet owners releasing their captive animals into the wild? Or perhaps a remnant population of mountain lions existed in the heart of the Ozarks that had previously gone entirely undetected? Perhaps both scenarios were true. Since about 1990, states east of the Rockies-from North Dakota to Michigan, down to eastern Texas and Louisiana-have been recording more cougars than at any time in more than a century.Įven before the long-distance travel of the Red Rocks Cat was documented, the number of mountain lion sightings in the midwestern part of North America had been increasing slightly-and wildlife biologists took notice. No longer categorized as bountied predators, they became a managed game species, and that allowed populations to rebound substantially. In the 1960s, however, wildlife management by states in the West reclassified cougars. But because of bounty hunting and habitat loss during European settlement of North America, cougars were extirpated from the eastern and midwestern portions of the continent and were pushed to exist almost exclusively in the rugged wilderness of the American and Canadian West. Mountain lions ( Puma concolor also called cougars, pumas, or catamounts) historically roamed most of the Western Hemisphere, and had one of the largest ranges of any mammal in the world. This cat is the reason I have been studying the range expansion of mountain lions for more than a decade.Įven though it was a surprise to hear about a cougar traversing the prairies of the midwestern United States in 2004, it would not have been so surprising 200 years ago. Fourteen months later, I was in the thick of figuring it out. It seemed that something was brewing and that this cat was an important clue. What’s more, this incident was not the first time a mountain lion had appeared outside the American West. Its journey of more than 1,100 kilometers represented, at the time, the longest dispersal distance ever recorded for a mountain lion. This cat-eventually dubbed the Red Rocks Cat, or at least that’s what I called it-originated in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I still think about how amazing the possibility is that a mountain lion and I, someone who would end up studying the species’ recolonization of its former habitats, could have been within kilometers of each other in one of the most unlikely of places. Mountain lions were the last thing on our minds. I traveled in a van for nearly three weeks with 19 other students and two professors, searching for snakes, skinks, and other wildlife while learning about the grassland ecosystems of the mixed-grass prairies. In May 2004 I had been on a field ecology trip to finish out my junior year at Minnesota State University, Mankato. The journey the cat took, according to its radio collar, led me to realize that only weeks before I learned about it, I may have shared the same space with that very cat-on the prairies of Kansas, of all places. The 52-kilogram, 2.5-year-old male mountain lion that met its unfortunate demise on some railroad tracks in Red Rocks, Oklahoma, in late May of 2004 was accompanied by a story-told by the radio collar it just so happened to be wearing. As it turns out, this poor cat changed my life.

Bobcat vs mountain lion