Super rare video of cougar in northern Minnesota
Voyageurs Wolf Project
November 3, 2022
We just got our first video ever of a cougar!! This rare footage was from October 20 and taken in the southern part of the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem. Fortunately, the footage is super clear so no disputing what kind of kitty this is!
The Minnesota DNR has verified 59 cougar observations in the state since 2004 (~3.4 observations/year…2022 numbers not available yet)—none of which have been in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem so far, though several weren’t too far away!
Most wild cougars observed in Minnesota are thought to be transient young males traveling from breeding populations of cougars in the western Dakotas. This is based on evidence (genetics, etc.) from cougars that died or were killed in Minnesota and other midwestern states.
Learn more about the Voyageurs Wolf Project:
Website: http://www.voyageurswolfproject.org
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"He likely emanates from the breeding population in the Black Hills area of South Dakota. I know the very few catamounts we've officially spotted in WI are from that S.D. location. About ten years ago a cougar went from South Dakota through Wisconsin all the way to New England (yes, New England!) where he was finally hit by a car and killed. He was a trooper. There's a book about him: "Heart of a Lion" by Stolzenburg. This fella on camera in this video here is probably a distant cousin of that New England puma."
-- Drew Hunkins
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Together, we can save America’s lion
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'America's Cat Is on the Comeback'
Michelle LaRue - American Scientist - Nov/Dec 2018
Mountain lions were extirpated in the eastern and midwestern United States after Europeans settled those areas, but now they are returning. Where will they go?
In the summer of 2004, I had just snuck into my cubicle at the back of the office at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) in Madelia after days of traveling around southern Minnesota putting leg bands on geese and searching for collared white-tailed deer that the DNR was tracking.
Coffee in hand, my computer sputtering to life after some inactivity, I learned the news that a mountain lion had been struck by a train—in northern Oklahoma. The location surprised my office mates and me; the large cats were generally known to live in rugged, forested wilderness, not on prairies, and certainly not in Oklahoma.
As it turns out, this poor cat changed my life. The 52-kilogram, 2.5-year-old male mountain lion that met its unfortunate demise on some railroad tracks in Red Rocks, Oklahoma, in late May of 2004 was accompanied by a story—told by the radio collar it just so happened to be wearing. The journey the cat took, according to its radio collar, led me to realize that only weeks before I learned about it, I may have shared the same space with that very cat—on the prairies of Kansas, of all places. In May 2004 I had been on a field ecology trip to finish out my junior year at Minnesota State University, Mankato. I traveled in a van for nearly three weeks with 19 other students and two professors, searching for snakes, skinks, and other wildlife while learning about the grassland ecosystems of the mixed-grass prairies. Mountain lions were the last thing on our minds. I still think about how amazing the possibility is that a mountain lion and I, someone who would end up studying the species’ recolonization of its former habitats, could have been within kilometers of each other in one of the most unlikely of places.
This cat—eventually dubbed the Red Rocks Cat, or at least that’s what I called it—originated in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Its journey of more than 1,100 kilometers represented, at the time, the longest dispersal distance ever recorded for a mountain lion. What’s more, this incident was not the first time a mountain lion had appeared outside the American West. It seemed that something was brewing and that this cat was an important clue. Fourteen months later, I was in the thick of figuring it out. This cat is the reason I have been studying the range expansion of mountain lions for more than a decade.
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Experts Divided Over Mysterious Big Black Cat Spotted In Mississippi
NowYouKnow
A Mississippi man was left scratching his head when he spotted what appears to be a massive black cat walking through a field and even experts can't agree on what he saw.
The strange encounter took place as David Sluder was pulling into a Wendy's restaurant in the city of Hernando and noticed something amiss in the distance.
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The Black Panther Mystery
In the comments section of the above video, there are a lot of tall tales of black panthers in Arkansas, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Missouri, Georgia, Tennessee, California, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, New Jersey, Kentucky, Vancouver Island, Oklahoma, Illinois, New York, Colorado, Ontario, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Alabama, Mexico, etc. It's interesting how folklore and/or a paranormal phenomena, can "migrate." The old unsolved black panther mystery from the UK seems to have relocated to North America and other locales.
Mountain lions never are black. Jaguars, found in Mexico and occasionally crossing over into the Southwest, can be black just like African leopards (panthers). However, jaguars are much more massive than the big cat in the above video. Lynxes, which can get up to 65 lbs, are Canadian and would never be found in Mississippi. Bobcats can be black, but clearly the above creature was much bigger than a bobcat. An escaped panther?
Actually the above animal was simply a mountain lion with light brown fur. Through a quirk of light and shadow, the very pointed top of a tree cast a thin but direct shadow onto that mountain lion from the late afternoon sun. At the end of the video, the lion begins to emerge and is seen as brown. The following images reflect how, even in direct sunlight, a dark shadow can coalesce around this big cat....
This isn't to say that there isn't a great mystery to the long standing black panther mystery in the UK, where there is no chance that that many sightings can be from "escaped black panthers." Below, a large black panther spotted last year in Wales....
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'Mystery as ‘puma’ spotted in Welsh hills and ‘black panther’ snapped in Oxfordshire'
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A video recorded on a cell phone southeast of Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada on October 22....
Canadian black lynx sighting video
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MonsterQuest: Mysterious Big Black Cat (S1, E7) | Full Episode
The UnXplained Zone
Mountain lions do occasionally attack humans, and when they do it makes headlines across the country. However, it has been reported that people are seeing something else--attacks by large black cats in Season 1, Episode 7.
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Native woman with a mountain lion
From daniel-eskridge.pixels.com
Woman with Mountain Lion by Daniel Eskridge
Leannda Culver
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