Thought all of you would get a kick out of one of the first(1995) articles authored by Eastern Cougar expert and writer Chris Bolgiano.....As we know, Cougars have recently been spotted in Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan over the past two years....................while there have been extensive searches in both the Northern and Southern Appalachians, the conclusion of experts is that Mountain Lions are absent from their historical range East of the Mississippi save the 100 or so indiviudals residing in Florida...............

Do cougars exist in the east? - eastern North America

American Forests, Jan-Feb, 1995 by Chris Bolgiano  

That depends on whom you ask--and how "pure" a creature you'll accept.
IN NOVEMBER 1992, biologists for the Canadian province of New Brunswick checked out a report of unusual tracks in the along a logging road within a hundred miles of the Maine border. The tracks were clawless, wider than they were long, and the walking and running strides averaged nearly four feet. One leap measured 16 feet over a clump of three-foot-high saplings whose dome of snow was unbrushed. Where logs poked above the snow, the trail led along the top of them. A scat found on top of a rock was sent to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Ontario, where elaborate microscope analysis uncovered the remains of snowshoe hares. It also identified hairs from the leg of a cougar, presumed to have been ingested when the animal groomed after eating. "There is thus little doubt," stated a letter from the museum to the biologists, "that the scat was produced by a cougar.

In a quiet way, this was revolutionary news. For most of the 20th century, the shadowy survival of cougars in eastern North America has aroused intense debate. Relentless persecution of the great cats, combined with the near extermination of deer by hunters and poachers and the denuding of vast tracts of land by loggers, drove eastern cougars to apparent extinction by the early 1900s, except for a remnant population in the swamps of southern Florida. But reports of cougars never died out. Sparse and scattered at first, they accumulated enough force to propel the eastern cougar subspecies (Puma concolor cougar) onto the list of animals protected by the 1973 Endangered Species Act. A few years later, cougar reports in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina were coming so thick and fast that local citizens threatened to file a lawsuit over clearcutting in national forests.

In response, Bob Downing, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, spent the early 1980s searching the southern Appalachians for verifiable signs of cougars. All he turned up were some unconfirmed tracks along the Blue Ridge Parkway and a few handfuls of possible scats, for which, at the time, techniques of analysis weren't advanced enough to be useful.

Once-captive cougars have a proven track record for reverting to their wild tendencies, if given the chance. "They're killing my sheep!" a woman's hearty British voice boomed over the din at a conference break. She had come from England to learn more about cougars, and passed around grisly photos of woolly carcasses. Reports of free-roaming cougars and other cats exotic to Great Britain soared after owners were forced by a 1976 law to purchase an expensive license--or get rid of their pets. There are cougars in Australia as well, rumored to have been U.S. military mascots in World War II, left behind on a continent where the only native mammals are humans and marsupials. 

In the United States, an astounding legal and illegal market in pet cougars provides an indisputable source of cats for eastern forests. Endearingly cute as kittens, cougars grow into voracious, unpredictable adults, and some are turned loose by exasperated owners. Several cougars killed in the East in recent decades have been presented to authorities for examination, and proved to have characteristics of former captives. One was a female cougar killed in Pennsylvania in 1967; with her was a companion, which escaped.
 Sue Morse, a consulting forester and wildlife-habitat specialist from Jericho, Vermont, who is nationally known for her work on cougars and other predators, agreed that "Individual clearcuts, by themselves, are not necessarily bad for cougars since they produce browse for deer."
But she added another perspective as well: "We need a big-picture approach, a regional overview of land use. Harvesting patterns of huge uncontrolled patches, roads, ski slopes, anything that cuts off access among blocks of habitat means that large predators will disappear. If we consider carnivores as indicators of ecosystem health, which they are, then we need to prevent fragmentation of habitat. Citizens should insist on wildlife-sensitive planning," she continued, "and landowners should be rewarded for good stewardship. Most of all, we need to get out in the field and up in airplanes and see what connections there are and aren't, what connections we need or can enhance through good forestry practices."Morse has founded a nonprofit organization, Keeping Track, to encourage citizens to get involved in their own landscapes, not merely by writing a check once a year to some environmental group but by participating in projects that identify critical habitat and monitor animal population trends. "It's time for our culture to make a real commitment to protection of natural resources," she said, "and the opportunities in the East are great. The eastern cougar is a symbol of the possibilities."
VIRGINIAN CHRIS BOLGIANO--writes on forestry and wildlife. In September, Stackpole Books will publish her first book, An Unnatural History of the Mountain Lion: People and Pumas in America.