Defenders Magazine

Show Me the Cougar

A team of Missouri biologists helps sort out cat fact from cat fancy

Heidi Ridgley

© Tim Fitzharris/Minden Pictures

From a standing position, a
mountain lion can jump 15 feet
straight up in the air or lunge up
to 40 feet in a single pounce.

Dave Hamilton opens the box of animal skulls he's just hauled from the back of his truck and pulls out one belonging to a mountain lion. Kneeling, he places the fangs over the top of two puncture wounds on the neck of a fresh deer hide and leans back so everyone can see. The teeth match the cuts perfectly. "Fits better than O.J. Simpson's glove," jokes fellow biologist Rex Martensen.

Hamilton, Martensen and others assembled on this unseasonably warm December morning are part of a 12-member mountain lion response team that answers calls from citizens who think they may have gotten a glimpse of the world's fourth-largest cat. They also analyze any evidence—kills, tracks and scat—left behind. In this case, a hunter found a deer cached under some brush, with its intestines and stomach—considered distasteful by mountain lions but delectable by other predators—rolled far from the body. Taken together, it was enough evidence for the team to declare that a big cat did the deed.

Here's the twist: We're not in California or Colorado or even the Dakotas, where breeding populations have recently re-established themselves. We're in Missouri, where the last native, wild mountain lion was killed in 1927.

Once common from coast to coast, the solitary mountain lions (also known as cougars, pumas, panthers or catamounts) were annihilated by early settlers. By the early 1900s, those still alive were confined to the West's most rugged and remote terrain—except for the panther subspecies that hangs on by a thread in the swamps of Florida, and a small population in Texas.

But today the big cats number perhaps 30,000 in the West and—buoyed by hunting restrictions and a thriving population of elk and deer—they are creeping eastward. In recent years central and Midwestern states have reported about two dozen credible occurrences.

Sometimes there's more evidence to rely on than bite marks and deer intestines. For example, a train struck a radio-collared cougar in Oklahoma in 2004—after it had traveled 661 miles from the Black Hills—and another killed one east of the Mississippi River in Illinois in 2000. Three more bodies have turned up in Iowa since then—one was hit by a car and two others were shot. Today's confirmation in Missouri is the 10th in the state since officials began taking a tally in 1994.

From the looks of it, the tawny cats are reclaiming lost ground. But whether they really are returning and whether they'll be able to establish viable breeding populations farther east is something that Hamilton and his team are still trying to determine.

They're not the only ones. "What's going on in the Midwest is compelling," says Mark Dowling, cofounder of the Cougar Network, a nonprofit research organization that began documenting the stealth cats' movements in 2002. "Mountain lions are showing up in places they haven't been in more than 100 years."

Many Missourians, however, would say the phantom felines never left. Their "sightings" keep the response team busy with hundreds of calls each year. "At least 99.99 percent of the calls turn out to be animals—often dogs or bobcats—that they mistake for mountain lions," says Hamilton. "I call it mountain lion mania—unfounded, undocumented sightings attributed to rampant overreaction." And it gives every biologist on the team their share of "war stories." "Our biggest challenges are from the people who tend to look at animals and wildlife more emotionally than rationally," says team member Bill Heatherly, who once took a call from someone claiming a cougar was plucking birds from the feeder in her yard.

Too often, the biologists travel long distances to analyze a track that turns out to be a dog's—sometimes the caller's own. Many of the reported lions turn out to be housecats. "If someone's looking through binoculars or a camera in an open field and they zoom in, they can lose perspective," says Hamilton. "When they see an animal out of context that walks like a mountain lion, they get emotionally involved, their heart races and they ignore other things—like the rabbit that walks into the frame that is exactly the same size."

Rarely does the team get a description from a caller that doesn't sound right. "They'll tell us, ‘It's a big yellow cat with a long tail and it's sitting in my backyard,'" says Hamilton. "That one turned out to be someone's Great Dane—and it was sitting in the front yard when we got there."

But with the evidence before the team today, all the biologists concur that the mountain lion, not the mania, is present this time. In fact, this is the second occurrence at opposite ends of the state that they confirm this week.

Arriving the day before, I caught up with Hamilton and Martensen en route to Chillicothe, a farming community in northwest Missouri where mountain lion hysteria is at fever pitch. "This is the spot where people think there's one behind every bush," says Hamilton. Residents are also notorious for mistaking bobcats for mountain lions—the smaller cats are making a resurgence here and some people are encountering them for the first time.

There certainly is no mistaking the photo in my hand. Taken by a hunter's heat-activated trail camera set up near a well-traveled deer route, it clearly shows a cougar using the trail—not the eight-point buck the hunter had anticipated. "We're not contesting the cat," says Hamilton. "The question is, does the actual landscape match what's in the photo." The team has had hoaxes played on them before.

To find out if this one is legit, when we get to the spot Martensen unfolds "Max," a life-size cardboard cutout of an adult panther, and positions it to line up with landmarks in the photo: a small forked tree sticking out just above the cat's shoulder blades, a branch pointing down at its rump, a dried stalk shooting up in front of two distinct spots on the inside of the cat's front leg. The markings—which fade completely at three years of age—indicate that it's about a year old. Max matches up with the cat in the photo almost perfectly. They guess it weighs 115 pounds.

"Now the only question remaining is, where did it come from," says Hamilton. It could be a young male moving east in search of its own territory. Adult males each require 100 to 150 square miles, depending on how plentiful their prey is—and they'll only share their turf with females. An adult male will even kill male offspring of his own if they stick around more than two years.

"It could've come from South Dakota," he says. "The Black Hills appear at capacity." With a current population of about 200, and females producing a total of about 40 young each year, the juvenile males have to go somewhere. "We're only about 500 miles away—well within striking range," says Hamilton. "Traveling about 25 miles a day, a cat could get here in less than a month." A cat could also strike out from Colorado, Montana or Wyoming, all of which have thousands of cats.

But there's another possibility. "I'd like to see who's missing a cat," says Steve Sheriff, the team's statistician, upon hearing the news the next day. Thousands of cougars reside in private hands across the country. In Missouri, nearly 30 people have permits to own them—and an unknown number hold them illegally. Most biologists believe that the few cougars documented in the Northeast and two Canadian provinces in recent years are almost certainly former captives. "There's no question that this is a cat, and the location's been confirmed, but what constitutes wild," asks Sheriff. "Could this just be an escapee?"

With only a photograph to go on, they may never know. But if this is a bachelor from the West in search of new territory, he faces many challenges—not the least of which is finding a mate. Females are not known to move far from their mother's home base. To date, there's only been one confirmed female mountain lion in the state and it may have been an escapee.

Yet, a female moving east is not out of the question, says Clay Nielsen, a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale who has just completed a project that maps potential cougar habitat in the Midwest. "Cougar populations out West have grown considerably, and a juvenile female wearing a radio collar recently traveled more than 600 miles from Utah, through Wyoming and back to Utah before ending up in Colorado," he says. More animals in less habitat could make both genders more prone to roam.

What they'll find after they strike out is another story. According to the study—which looked at habitat in Arkansas, the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Nebraska—only 8 percent of the land is highly suitable for mountain lions. "That's not very much," says Nielsen. "But there is likely enough cougar habitat in the Ozarks of south-central Missouri, Minnesota's extreme northeast and Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas."

Should they make it and start breeding, the next problem faced by the cats would be getting Midwesterners to share their land. But that's also possible, says Harley Shaw, a retired research biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department. "In most parts of the West where mountain lions exist, people are fairly calm about them." he says. "When one turns up in an urban area, there's a flurry of excitement and concern about kids and dogs, but all in all people accept the fact that they're here, and there's no great push to get rid of them." In the Midwest, however, because they've been missing for decades, the states will most likely have to launch public-education campaigns to teach people that it's okay that wild cats are out there. "Their arrival back on the scene might frighten some people, but the odds of a mountain lion attack are so slim that there's nothing to be anxious about compared to other things that can happen to you," says Shaw. "I'd be more worried about being attacked by another human being."

For now, at least, learning how to live with this awe-inspiring predator in the Midwest isn't necessary. If mountain lions currently populated their old stomping grounds in any large number, physical proof would be more readily found, says Hamilton. In states where they are known to exist, the big cats are rarely seen but evidence of their presence is all around. In Florida, for example, where there are fewer than 80 panthers left, the state averages one road-kill a month. With few warm bodies, most biologists believe that Missouri and its neighbors don't have a self-sustaining population.

That, however, doesn't keep Hamilton from pursuing this feline phantom—after all, this is the Show-Me State. On the morning of my departure, he's following up on another reported sighting. This time the person has no deer hide and no hidden camera photo. He was going on what he saw, and Hamilton wasn't about to take his word for it. "Let me know what it turns out to be," I say to Hamilton as I walk out the door. "We'll never know," he calls after me. "He will describe a mountain lion."

Senior Editor Heidi Ridgley has only encountered housecats in the wild.