Eastern Cougar - Possible Colonization of East By Western Cougars

Possible Colonization of East By Western Cougars

Until around 1990, reports of mountain lions in the Midwest and East were highly influenced by the "Bigfoot factor," according to Mark Dowling, co-founder of the Eastern Cougar Network. "None of it was really real," he said in an interview. But the situation has changed dramatically since that time according to Dowling, whose group collects and disseminates data on the shifting mountain lion population.

Dowling said in 2003 that sightings in the eastern half of the nation, including Michigan, etc., were "almost certainly" escaped captives, but he added that the notion that (Western) cougars "will eventually reach New Jersey" is a reasonable prediction, in part due to increased populations of whitetail deer.

However, some of these cougars found far in the east were established to be of western origin. As noted in an opinion piece by David Baron in the New York Times, concerning a cougar killed by a car in Connecticut in 2011:

"Wildlife officials, who at first assumed the cat was a captive animal that had escaped its owners, examined its DNA and concluded that it was a wild cougar from the Black Hills of South Dakota. It had wandered at least 1,500 miles before meeting its end at the front of an S.U.V. in Connecticut. That is one impressive walkabout."

"You have to appreciate this cat’s sense of irony, too. The cougar showed up in the East just three months after the Fish and Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct, a move that would exempt the officially nonexistent subspecies of the big cat from federal protection. Perhaps this red-state cougar traveled east to send a message to Washington: the federal government can make pronouncements about where cougars are not supposed to be found, but a cat’s going to go where a cat wants to go."