I missed the news that a Mountain Lion/Cougar/Puma was killed last month crossing Rt 15 in Milford, CT, a few miles from where we used to live (potentially less than 10 miles, but I don't know where in Milford the Cougar was killed), but the story made the NYT again today. This is, at least a bit, vindication for our former CT neighbor who claimed to have seen a Cougar in his yard and who reported that the lore with local hunters was that Cougars were in the area. I previously discussed this topic in a 2008 post.
Today's NYT story is that, based on DNA analysis,
On Tuesday, in what state officials termed “amazing news,” they said that the Connecticut Cougar had made its way east from the Black Hills of South Dakota and that genetic testing matched samples of an animal confirmed as having been in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
That means that the animal traveled more than 1,500 miles to Connecticut, more than twice as far as the longest dispersal pattern ever recorded for a mountain lion. The news stunned researchers trying to make sense of the first confirmed presence of the species in Connecticut in more than a century. Many believed that the animal must have been released or had escaped from captivity.
Daniel C. Esty, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said that the journey was a remarkable and positive reminder of the ability of wild animals to survive and adapt, but that there was no evidence that mountain lions were returning to the state.
“This is the first evidence of a mountain lion making its way to Connecticut from western states, and there is still no evidence indicating that there is a native population of mountain lions in Connecticut,” he said.
But the finding may add at least a smidgen of mystery or paranoia to dozens of reports of similar creatures in Connecticut and the Northeast, most of them investigated and then dismissed as mistaken impressions. Before the animal was reported seen in early June in Greenwich, the last confirmed sighting of a mountain lion in Connecticut was in the late 1800s.
Dennis Schain, communications director for the department, said that the development could lead people to wonder if there were other mountain lions, but that there was no reason to believe so.
“We’ve never seen any evidence of that,” he said, “and you can see that in other states where they do get mountain lions dispersing they have evidence — a footprint, scat, DNA. We’ve never had any of that. There’s been no evidence of them moving into this area except for this incident.”
Doug commented on my previous Cougar post in 2008:
Just had breakfast with some people who know this subject very, very well. They say that there are certainly breeding populations of cougars in New England but that it is convenient for state and federal wildlife officials to ignore or deny this. Apparently, if their presence were confirmed, they would be required to pursue costly management practices and enforce a variety of unpopular regulations, while budgets of the state agencies (though not federal ones) are typically based on revenues from hunting licenses. Since these animals wouldn't be hunted, there is no incentive for the agencies to "find" them... And from a conservation standpoint, they see no urgency to manage the populations, which are thought to be doing quite well without any intervention.
Note the tension between the official and the unofficial views.
