ields or prairies for long distances if they have to,” she says. But cornfields and prairies aren’t suitable habitat for the cougars to settle in. She says they require forest cover, rugged terrain and dispersal corridors (typically rivers) that allow easy migration for both the cats and their prey. “They’re a stalk-and-ambush predator so they need places to hide,” she says.
LaRue says this is probably just the beginning of cougars recolonizing the Midwest. “Now we can start asking more questions: Where are they going to end up, how many are they going to be, and how are they going to interact with their ecosystems?” In the paper, LaRue and her co-authors suggest that wildlife professionals “begin to think about public awareness campaigns in areas likely to encourage dispersing cougars” because people in these Midwest states are not used to living with large predators. A good model is the California Department of Fish and Game’s Keep Me Wild campaign, which offers tips on coexisting with cougars and staying safe near them. They also suggest the more eastern states follow the lead of Nebraska and Missouri and develop conservation strategies for the animals.
The Midwest might not be the cougars’ final stop in their habitat re-expansion. Last year a male cougar traveled at least 2,400 kilometers from South Dakota to Connecticut before being killed by an SUV.
“The recolonization of former range by cougars is one of the most significant changes in the wildlife landscape of the U.S. in the last few decades,” says Howard Quigley, Teton Cougar Project director and executive director of jaguar programs for Panthera, which was not involved in this study. “One key to the future—and the successful colonization—will be the presence of enough good habitat to support resident cougars.” He also says government agencies, educators and communities will need to come together to develop plans to coexist with their new carnivore neighbors.
In other cougar news, another study published June 13 in Biology Letters tracked animals in Chile that had been mounted with GPS collars and found that their kills (or more specifically, their leftovers) provided an important food source for a half-dozen different scavenger species. “Food provided by pumas may be vital to the maintenance and diversity of scavenger and decomposer communities in Patagonia and elsewhere,” the authors wrote.
Previously in Extinction Countdown:
Photo by the California Department of Fish and Game via Flickr