MPR News: "You may remember a couple of years ago, a lot of us were following reports of a cougar making its way around the northern Twin Cities suburbs.
That adventurous cat eventually made it all the way to Connecticut, where it was killed by a car.
Now, a report from the University of Minnesota published in The Journal of Wildlife Management says that cougars, or mountain lions, like that one are slowly expanding their range eastward returning to areas where they were killed off a century ago."
Cougars once lived across most of the country, but have long since been pushed into mountainous hideouts. Now, they're making a comeback. Many of them roam from the Black Hills of South Dakota, where at least 220 of the animals live.
U of M doctoral student Michelle LaRue has been compiling confirmed sightings and physical evidence collected by wildlife agencies and a non-profit group called the Cougar Network.
LaRue found 178 cougar confirmations in the Midwest, with numbers steadily increasing over the last 20 years. That may not sound like a lot of sightings, but LaRue says the team was very particular about the evidence it accepted.
"It had to be either a carcass, photo, video, track, or scat of an actual animal," she said.
Researchers also accepted sightings by trained wildlife biologists. Apparently, many animals are easily mistaken for a cougar.
Last year, the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association asked members to send in reports and photographs from trail cameras of cougars.
The vast majority of the photos were decidedly something else, said Mark Johnson, the group's executive director.
"Some were very definitely a house cat or a fox, or a bobcat. There was one that was walking behind a tree but you could tell it was a yellow lab," Johnson said.
But last fall, Tony Rondeau of Fergus Falls captured a cougar on his trail camera.
"Checked the camera and there was a cougar sighting on it, it was like seven o'clock in the evening — about the time a person would be getting out of their deer stand — and it walked within, I would guess, 18 yards of my archery deer stand," Rondeau said.
Continued: tp://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/06/14/environment/cougars-bounce-back/
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