We recently published an article on how there have been 5 documented Cougars found in Kansas over the past several years--We asked our friend Helen Mcginnis of COUGAR REWILDING(formerly the Eastern Cougar Foundation) to weigh in on the status of Mountain Lion in the Plains States and to speculate where the young male prospectors were emanating from.........As Helen states: "To have a documented breeding population of cougars, you must have documented females and preferably, kittens"

From: Helen McGinnis <HelenMcGinnis@frontiernet.net>
To: Meril, Rick
Sent: Tue Feb 01 05:07:33 2011
Subject: Breeding populations on the Plains

Here's some info on cougars of the Plains.  Hopefully I will soon issue another newsletter with updates for Missouri and the Lake States.

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To have a documented breeding population of cougars, you must have documented females and preferably, kittens.  The vast majority of cougars showing up in central North America, when the sex is known, are young males.  Females are physically capable of dispersing as far as young males, but usually they stay much close to their mother's home range.  Four regions on the western edge of the Great Plains have been recolonized:

(a) the Black Hills-Bear Lodge Mountains in South Dakota and Wyoming
(b) the Badlands of southwestern North Dakota
(c) the Pine Ridge area and possibly the Wildcat Hills in western Nebraska
(d) the Cypress Hills, which straddle the Alberta-Saskatchewan border not far north of Montana
 The Black Hills were the first to be recolonized.  They are probably the source of the Badlands and Pine Ridge populations.  The Cypress Hills probably were recolonized from Montana or Alberta.

The cougar populations of the Black Hills and Badlands are now hunted.  The current goal is to reduce the population of the Black Hills.  The goal is to remove 90 cougars from the Black Hills in South Dakota & Wyoming by March 31st. 
 Some people assume that an area is overpopulated with cougars when subadult males start leaving the region.  But most subadult males must leave their mother's home range because the territory of an adult male encompasses the home ranges of an average of three females.  Adult males are intolerant of other males and may kill young males within their territories.

In the past two years cougars have been documented in KS, MN, WI, IA, the Upper Peninsula of MI, IN, MO, and eastern TX.   I am dubious that the Black Hills are the source all or even most of the young males that are occasionally showing up.

  For the Cougar Rewilding Foundation newsletter issued in November - http://www.easterncougar.org/newltr_pdf/crfnew_Nov10.pdf , I summarize confirmations in IN, ND, SD, NE, IA, eastern TX and KS.  Very few have been documented on the prairies of ND and SD in the past two years, in contrast to numerous confirmations in Nebraska outside Pine Ridge, mainly along corridors of eastward flowing rivers.

  Central Canada is another possible source of dispersing young males.  Besides the breeding population in the Cypress Hills, many sightings have been reported in Saskatchewan, but it is uncertain how many of these sightings were confirmed by evidence.