GPS monitoring information exhibits how the cougar made its method via the Rocky Mountains, crossing reservoirs and freeways
Utah DWR biologist Morgan Hinton (middle proper), one other biologist, and two houndsmen with “F66,” the mountain lion they collared in February 2022. {Photograph} courtesy Utah DWR
A current YouTube video shared by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources exhibits one GPS-collared mountain lion’s epic journey throughout the West. The large cat’s roughly 1,000-mile trek started in Might 2022, when the grownup feminine lion often called F66 set out from the Wasatch Mountains in central Utah. Its journey got here to an finish on the jap slope of Colorado’s Entrance Vary in November, when it was killed by one other cougar.
Protecting round 6 miles a day for 165 days straight, the mountain lion handed via three states, swam a significant reservoir, and survived a number of freeway crossings, exhibiting the unimaginable lengths these animals are keen to go of their efforts to ascertain new territories.
“F66’s journey is among the furthest ever recorded for GPS-tracked cougars,” DWR biologist Morgan Hinton writes in a press release.
Hinton explains that the company began utilizing GPS collars to trace cougars in 2018. They’ve since collared greater than 60 grownup cougars in Utah, a lot of which have crossed into neighboring states. She says all this information has helped biologists determine the important thing journey corridors that cougars use whereas giving them a greater understanding of why cougars bear these journeys within the first place — and the way their actions are influenced by age and intercourse.
F66, a 2-year-old feminine, was caught and fitted with a GPS collar in Utah’s Wasatch Vary in February 2022. She caught across the space till Might 30, when she set out on her lengthy, circuitous stroll into southwest Wyoming after which down into Colorado. Hinton clarifies that this was not a migration however a “dispersal,” which is a one-way journey away from a house vary.
As a result of cougars are solitary predators that occupy and defend their massive territories from different cougars, they frequently search out new residence ranges. Research has shown that subadult males born in areas with dense cougar populations don’t have any alternative however to go away residence. And whereas F66’s journey is spectacular, it’s not the primary — nor the furthest — cross-country journey that’s been documented by wildlife biologists.
A part of a Bigger Eastward Development
As cougar populations stay wholesome throughout their core vary within the western U.S., they appear to be dispersing even additional with higher frequency. This has been documented in a number of states the place cougars have been absent for a century or extra. Wildlife biologists in Minnesota and Wisconsin are seeing extra transient cougars coming into these states from the Dakotas. In November, a Wisconsin bowhunter killed one in self-defense. It was the primary mountain lion killed within the state in 115 years, and a biologist with the state’s Division of Pure Sources mentioned he believes the cat got here from the Dakotas as effectively.
“Because the completely different pockets of obtainable territory grow to be now not vacant, they should go elsewhere. That’s what we predict is occurring,” College of Minnesota researcher Michelle LaRue explained to Scientific American in 2012. “There aren’t any extra pockets of vacant habitat within the West … and elsewhere occurs to be the Midwest the place there’s habitat however no competing cougars.”
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That is additionally occurring in locations additional south. Simply final week, the Arkansas Sport and Fish Fee announced the discovery a dead mountain lion within the northern a part of the state. It was the primary lion carcass seen there in a decade, and it added to the practically two dozen confirmed lion sightings which were recorded in Arkansas since 2010, based on AGFC spokesman Keith Stephens. Biologists there additionally consider these cougars are working their method southward and eastward from Wyoming and South Dakota.
Nonetheless, essentially the most spectacular cougar dispersal occasion — a minimum of that was broadly lined — occurred in 2011, when researchers inspected a mountain lion that was hit by an SUV in Connecticut. (As much as that time, no confirmed sightings of mountain lions had occurred for the reason that 1800s). Utilizing DNA testing, they determined that the lion had traveled there from South Dakota’s Black Hills by means of Wisconsin and Minnesota, masking greater than 1,500 miles on its method.
