Guide House Cougar: Going All the Way

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Cougar finally asked, and all turned to face him curiously. “All you need is a “​Why go all the way to Edmonton looking for a housekeeper?” Lydie spoke She wouldn't need to move very far, and she'd have a home, and a job. She wouldn't.
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For some reason people like to Photoshop pictures of mountain lions onto trail camera photos or claim that pictures were taken in places where they were not. For example, the most common hoax we have seen is one of a captive leopard from South Africa—his name is Leo—which has purportedly been taken everywhere from Texas all the way to Pennsylvania over the past several years. Bounty hunting caused much of the decline in mountain lion populations in the 19th century. Hunter Alexander Crowell is pictured with the last mountain lion killed in Vermont in Crowell had the cougar stuffed, and then he traveled throughout the state charging people a fee to take their picture with the catamount.

The hoaxes keep us busy, hone our skills, and signal increased public interest. That increased interest in cougars across the Midwest is good news for us, because every so often we do actually verify photos and tracks along with our state partners, and the intrigue grows. The Red Rocks Cat was a major confirmation for the Cougar Network: We knew for certain where the animal came from, which led us to recognize the need to look into this recolonization of a large, apex predator.

I had no clue at the time that this poor traveler from South Dakota would influence my career trajectory. A year later I went from an intern at the Minnesota DNR to a graduate student in southern Illinois, looking at this very question about what exactly we might expect if cougars were successful and expanded their range eastward into the prairie and agriculture-dominated section of the country we call the Midwest.

In mid-August , I moved to Carbondale, Illinois, with my golden retriever puppy. My job was to follow up on the dozens of confirmations of mountain lions that both preceded and followed the Red Rocks Cat to figure out whether cougars are recolonizing the midwestern United States, and if so, where they are likely to go. My ultimate goal was a map identifying the various places that were both suitable and unsuitable habitat for these large cats.

I used information gathered by dozens of field biologists who had reported cougar sightings over decades to predict what mountain lions might do in the future, based on what they have done in the past. This approach was the only feasible way to broach my question about mountain lion recolonization. Putting collars on mountain lions to figure out what kind of habitat they prefer in the Midwest would have been impossible. There was no way to figure out where to even begin looking for an animal to collar. Instead, I had to get creative, making a map of suitable habitats based on the vast number of observations that have been made by other people.

North Dakota now has populations of mountain lions, and in three spots in Nebraska, the big cats are breeding. Thus, it was important to get things right the first time. And that first time took a hell of a lot of effort.

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My goal was to make a single map showing where cougars are likely to end up if they continue to expand their range eastward. Toward this goal, I spent hours, voluntarily, on the weekends in the geospatial lab at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, downloading land cover and elevation data, compiling information about human presence, and calculating human densities across a nine-state region. These were common for me, experiences I have fortunately compressed in the banks of my memory by now.

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But that muscle memory is still there. To this day doing computer work with large data sets keeps me on my toes, and I have since learned the comforts of having constant backups of my data, which keeps my anxiety to a minimum. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I achieved my goal.

On a sweltering day in the summer of I had a map of suitable cougar habitat in the Midwest. It was one of those days when you avoid movement between buildings because sweat just makes the frigid office temperatures even more miserably cold. I first used a small chunk of my data, just to test how well it predicted what we already knew about where cougars occur. Think of looking at various types of maps—some showing all the counties in my study area, with darker areas representing more people; some maps were green and yellow, representing the forests and prairies available on the landscape; and other maps were based on the topography of the landscape, showing the hills and rivers.

All these separate map types were important to learning about cougar habitat in the Midwest. My final job was to effectively mash them all together into one map that showed me the places that had the best combinations of habitat in which cougars could persist. Cougar tracks can be identified by their size and shape. The comparison footprints at right are 30 percent of their actual size.

If one draws a line across the tips of the second and third digits of a paw and another across the top of the first and fourth digits, the two lines will be roughly parallel in dogs and coyotes but not in pumas. Since the Oklahoma Red Rocks Cat made its appearance in , there have been more than cougars confirmed as carcasses east of the Rocky Mountains—across the agricultural plains of the Midwest, into the heart of Chicago, and even all the way to the Eastern Seaboard.

Indeed, in the ensuing decade we have found populations of mountain lions in North Dakota, and in three spots in Nebraska, the big cats are breeding. Mountain lions and bobcats are often confused with one another in photographs. They can be distinguished by the presence or absence of the tail and by their size difference.

If the hind end is obstructed and the scale is unclear in a photo, the mountain lion can also be identified by its smaller head in relation to the size of its body, its lack of ear tufts, and the black fur on the back of its ears.

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It took only seven years for the record-breaking dispersal distance of the Red Rocks Cat to be surpassed. The 4,kilometer passage and unfortunate end of this young male was so phenomenal that journalist William Stolzenburg wrote a book about him.


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Certainly such a trek is book-worthy, but for mountain lions to set up shop in these new places, males cannot be the only ones making the dangerous journey. Breeding females, and males with the ability to find them, are key. Or so we thought.


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In about , the major milestone of confirmation that a female had reproduced in the Midwest was met: A photo from Nebraska revealed kittens with their mother—in an area where our map had predicted only marginal habitat for cougars, or at least not enough contiguous habitat to have a sustainable population.

Not only has northwestern Nebraska become repopulated with cougars in the past decade, but DNA evidence of females—potentially still alive, even—was discovered in southeastern Nebraska and in Missouri in , and probably most impressively in Tennessee in late We have DNA samples from three different animals in those three locations, but the individuals are related to populations in the Black Hills and in places in Nebraska.

We have to keep tracking these confirmations diligently and plotting them systematically to learn what we can expect. The plains of Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma always struck me as an unlikely context for a creature that requires substantial cover with trees, boulders, and other vegetation to stalk its prey.

And maybe the river corridors are not only allowing for easier travel, but are also acting like a funnel to move mountain lions toward some of the best habitat the Midwest has to offer. Click the map to replay it and click here to visit the interactive version at The Cougar Network. So, what else can we learn from these cats? How can we continue to watch them spread, and how can we ensure that citizens and residents are adequately informed? These are questions left to be investigated, but if history is any indication, we might have answers sooner than we think. Based on the original map my colleagues and I created in , we recently predicted the likely timeline of female mountain lions showing up in the suitable habitat the Midwest has to offer.

Our models suggest this recolonization will happen within 25 years. When he arrived here, the students were looking for a name for the student newspapers the school's first extracurricular activity. He suggested that they call the newspaper the Cougar because of the grace, power and pride that the Cougar embodies. The name was unanimously agreed upon. From that time on all University of Houston student groups and activities have been associated with Cougars. We may well be the only university in the USA to name its athletic teams after the student newpaper.

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Shasta is the name of the very first cougar that ever represented the University of Houston. The winning entry was from then student Joe Randol. His submission was as follows:. Shasta have a cage, Shasta have a keeper, Shasta have a winning ball club, Shasta have the best. The cougar, a pound, month old Mexican puma became entrenched in campus lore on Oct.

Shasta served as the "Grand Marshall" at the University's homecoming celebration, which began that day. The five Shastas all had their individual legacies. Shasta II's reign was the shortest because of an unruly attitude and was the first cougar to reside in Shasta's Den, a small cage located in the southeast corner of Lynn Eusan Park.

She served from Shasta III, a. Incidentally, she may have been the most famous. Shasta IV, a.

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However, when "Baby" grew up, the Cougar Guard could not control her. So, "Baby Shasta" retired in at the ripe old age of three. Shasta V, the final live cougar, was mascot for nine years before she was put to sleep because of kidney failure. However, after the death of Shasta V in , the university has not purchased another live cougar.

So, the debates rage on. Today, Shasta has morphed into a costumed student, but still maintains the spirit of the Coogs. Shasta has been joined by a new "female" costumed mascot named Sasha. Many of the alumni were perplexed by this as Shasta was also female In recent years, another Cougar has been featured in the University's "Learning. This cougar is named Tigger.

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Tigger is a professional animal model who neither belongs to the University nor lives on campus. Basketball: Scoring Dunks With the popularity of the NBA slam dunk competition on the rise, the Houston basketball fans decided to make a statement that the best dunks occurred in Hofheinz Pavilion. As you would imagine, all Cougar dunks are perfect 10s. Even now, you may see a few scorecards break out after a Cougar dunk.

Key Jingling During the last minute of a UH basketball contest in Hofheinz Pavilion, the fans began breaking out their keys house keys, car keys, locker keys, etc. Who's He? After each name was called, they would yell in unison: Who's He? Once it was time for the home team to be announced the papers were folded down and torn into pieces. Unfortunately, this tradition has gone on hiatus. An oil field siren was chosen to represent the University's ties to the petroleum industry and the "air-raid" style of offense at the time.