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Not everyone thinks the cougars will make it back east.  Even though young males from breeding colonies in the Dakotas and Nebraska are increasingly heading into the Midwest, researchers and conservationists at the Cougar Rewilding Foundation make  a compelling case that hunters may stop it before it gets going. 

They report the results of cougar mortalities in the last decade and found a clear distinction between what happened before hunting was allowed and after.  The short version: Before 2005 most died far from their breeding grounds. But in recent years far more have been killed -- by guns -- in North and South Dakota than have died elsewhere. In a paper posted on their web site, their researchers say:

  Since sport hunting of cougars (in South Dakota) began in the fall of 2005, quotas have risen steadily from twenty-five in 2005 and 2006 to fifty in 2011. Last year, over-riding even their biologists’ recommendations, the commissioners raised the quota to seventy, or fifty females, based on disputed claims of elk-calf depredations.

Seventy-three cougars were taken during the South Dakota 2012 season. The final three kills became controversial when a state biologist failed to immediately report his kill, the seventieth. The last cat taken was a six-eight month-old female kitten.

In total, hunters killed 113 cougars in the Black Hills National Forest/Bear Lodge during the 2011-2012 seasons, nearly a third under the breeding age of two. More than 200 cougars have been killed in the colony during the past two hunting seasons, perhaps the single highest percentage taken from a breeding population in any western region during a two-year period in the modern era of cougar management.

Star Tribune photo

And those were just the killed legally in the breeding cougar colonies. South Dakota in 2008 passed a law allowing any landowner with a $15.00 license to shoot a cougar.   

It took twenty years of dispersal from the Black Hills to establish a breeding colony 100 miles to the southeast in the Nebraska Pine Ridge. At that rate, under good conditions, breeding may not occur in Minnesota before 2050, let alone further east. With a deliberate goal of dramatically reducing females in the Black Hills, and with a five-to-one ratio of females to males taken during 2011 in the Badlands, conditions for cougar dispersal and recolonization now are far from ideal.

 

John Laundre, a wildlife researcher a the SUNY Oswego in New York, now has a new book out called Phantoms of the Prairie on the history of cougars and their likely, or unlikely, success at moving back into their historic territory.  Laundre is also a vice president of the Cougar Rewilding Foundation.