Leaving her home range in the mountains of central Utah, she headed east. The 2.5-year-old veered a bit north, and then a little south, before crouching on the banks of a reservoir straddling Utah and Wyoming, stepping in, and swimming at least a quarter of a mile to the other side.
Over the following months she would cross four major interstates before dying at the paws of another mountain lion on the eastern slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.
This plucky female cougar, which scientists dubbed F66, ultimately traveled about a thousand miles, one of the longest ever recorded by a GPS-collared cougar. (Read how mountain lions can swim long distances, a surprising discovery.)
Her 2022 journey is the latest of about 200 recorded cases of cougars that have wandered east in recent decades, a kind of reverse feline manifest destiny. In 2009, a famous male cougar voyaged from western South Dakota to Connecticut.
Based in part on such journeys, about 10 years ago, scientists predicted North America’s biggest wild cat could recolonize states like Arkansas and Missouri within 25 years. Cougars once roamed across North America before European settlers eliminated them from everywhere but rugged western terrain and Florida, home to a small population of a subspecies called the Florida panther.
But as of 2024, cougar expansion is limited to a few ambitious individuals and a lot of mistaken identities, says Mark Elbroch, puma program director for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization.
And if the species were to thrive in the East, both state government and the public must also be tolerant of a predator in their midst.
“We need to help people understand the benefits of sharing a landscape with big cats, how they really do fortify our ecosystems,” Elbroch says. “They support biodiversity. They make systems more resilient. And ultimately, that only makes our communities stronger and healthier.”
“She is cruising”
In early 2022, Utah wildlife biologists collared F66 as part of a project looking at how lions move across the landscape and select or scavenge their prey. The researchers expected some cats to wander—particularly males—but maybe only a couple hundred miles.
That’s why Morgan Hinton, a wildlife biologist with the Utah Department of Natural Resources, was so surprised when she opened her laptop in the summer of 2022 and saw F66’s coordinates far from the cat’s home range.
“Then I wanted to look at her every day,” Hinton says, since the cat’s collar pinged regular locations to a satellite every 24 hours. “Especially when she got into the Uinta Mountains of Utah. We knew: This cat is going to go somewhere. She is cruising.”
And then the cat stopped. Soon, instead of a location, her collar sent a mortality signal. The Utah biologists asks their counterparts in Colorado to inspect F66’s carcass, and they found the young cat had been killed by another lion. No one knows why, though lions can be very territorial. (Read how some mountain lions are ambushing and killing wolves.)
“We were pretty convinced she would end up in Kansas,” Hinton says. “She just got caught passing through.”
Roadblocks to recovery
Researchers expect these feline escapades to become more difficult.
Lawmakers in Utah, for example, voted in 2023 to allow unlimited mountain lion hunting across the state year-round. Wildlife officials in southwest Wyoming also recently decided to increase lion hunting in hopes of boosting mule deer numbers.
Elbroch says those decisions, combined with more people moving to and driving around the West, could make it harder for lions to disperse. He also noted that a one-off dispersal is not the same as a group of mountain lions settling into an area and raising kittens.
It took 20 years for mountain lions from South Dakota’s Black Hills to reestablish themselves in Nebraska’s Pine Ridge Mountains, about a hundred miles away, according to a 2015 paper led by Michelle LaRue, an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in the U.K. who studied North American cougars.
Yet that population still only numbers 20 animals, and the state recently opened a limited hunting season for the feline.
What’s more, for lions to naturally move back into the Midwest or East, they’d need to find not only mates but good habitat, such as land rich with prey species and unfragmented by busy highways and housing subdivisions. Collar data from the Utah study showed most of the study animals seemed to avoid roads, according to Darren DeBloois, Utah’s game mammals program coordinator.
Of course, there are places where mountain lions have adjusted to living in urban environments, such as Los Angeles, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and Santiago, Chile. One lion, called P22, became a global celebrity of sorts after spending about a decade in the Hollywood Hills. (Learn how some Los Angeles mountain lions are becoming inbred.)
Cougar or not?
Maybe it’s stories like F66’s, or the one about the lion in Connecticut, or the one shot by police in an alley in Chicago’s North Side, but people living in the Midwest and East still often believe they see cougars in their backyards.
LaRue once ran a popular Twitter account with the hashtag #cougarornot that allowed people to share images they believed showed mountain lions. She would post the photo and then ask people to guess what the animal was, before finally revealing its identity at a certain time.
Most of the time, cats in the pictures were bobcats, though they were, on occasion, yellow Labradors or golden retrievers.
She says mistaken identities are probably due to the public not knowing the sizes of various wild cats, such as bobcats.
It’s also “exciting to see things that are out of the ordinary,” she says. “And because it’s not totally out of the question for a mountain lion to be in Louisville, Kentucky, or downtown Chicago. But it’s very, very unlikely.”
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