Individual Florida panthers and Midwestern cougars that have traveled long distances have been hit by cars, shot by hunters or killed by authorities in recent years throughout the Southeast, Midwest and East, but there is no breeding population in the historic range of the eastern puma.
The extermination of pumas along with wolves and lynx led to the current overabundance of white-tailed deer and accompanying declines in tree regrowth —because the deer eat acorns and saplings — as well as loss of vegetative cover needed by ground-nesting birds. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1. For Immediate Release, January 22, Contact:. The U. In a statement about the removal, U. Fish and Wildlife characterized eastern cougars as long extinct.
Whether or not this can be really characterized as an extinction, he says, depends on how loosely you use that term. While cougar populations in this region have declined to the point of non-existence, it's more accurate to say only a certain population of the North American cougar species overall has vanished. The de-listing did not impact the subspecies of Florida panthers , a big cat considered to be one of the world's most endangered mammals.
Both Robinson and Elbroch suggest that removing the Eastern cougars from the endangered species list could open up new conservation opportunities. As a whole, cougars across the U. According to conservation organization the Cougar Fund , all Western states except Texas have at least some protections for cougars. In most places, cougars can legally be hunted with a permit.
In a statement about the de-listing, Robinson called on state governors to come up with local protections for the animals. There's no doubt that Western cougar populations are heading east. Once documented only west of the Rockies, Western cougars have been popping up in the Midwest, and some males have even been found closer to the East Coast.
Male cougars are known to roam large distances in search of territory or mates, but when females are spotted in the East, it would be one sign of a rebounding population, says Elbroch.
No current reintroduction plans are in place, except for Florida, where cougars from Texas have been introduced as a possible way to boost population numbers and diversity for the Florida panther subspecies. In a recently published paper , Elbroch found that cougars are what he calls subordinate predators in the ecosystem, meaning they're carnivores, but also face threats from larger predators like wolves and bears.
Currently, the IUCN lists North American cougars as a species of least concern overall, but notes that their population is declining. The animals face significant threats from habitat loss and fragmentation, and some down-the-line impacts from hunters killing younger males. Robinson hopes to see more state-by-state conservation measures enacted to preserve the ecological balance these large predators provide. A decline in large predators is thought to be at least partially responsible for growing deer numbers.
Deer carry ticks, and the growing threat of lyme disease has been a possible concern. Additionally, Robinson adds, he would like to see the species protected for its own sake.
He lives in the mountains of New Mexico and says it's thrilling to see one in the wild. All rights reserved. To see one in the northeastern U. Who's What and Since When? Rather, the eastern puma was mostly a casualty of the late 19th century destruction of the Virginia whitetail deer population in most states east of the Mississippi River. This occurred through the combination of forest conversion to fields, market hunting, and a recreational hunting boom that followed the establishment of deer seasons in many states.
In gist, the establishment of bag limits for deer created the erroneous impression among turn-of-theth-century hunters that they were all entitled to their quotas, as opposed to the intention of setting upper ends on the numbers who could be killed. See Wildlife in America author Peter Matthiessen, Deer did not recover to huntable abundance in several states for decades. Some states suspended deer hunting altogether——Ohio as recently as , for a single season, while Connecticut, the last state to reopen deer hunting, waited until to do so.
With deer scarce, eastern pumas turned to hunting livestock, especially sheep. Then, because eastern pumas had never been especially abundant in the first place, they were relatively easily hounded out of existence on the pretext of protecting livestock. A similar sequence of events leading to the loss of much of the puma population occurred in the western U.
The extirpation of wolves from the west for 70 years before the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and the northern Rockies probably helped pumas by removing a competitor. The extermination of grizzly bears by California hunters in and the reduction of the grizzly population to the verge of extinction elsewhere might also have helped pumas to extend their range in the west despite intense hunting pressure whenever and wherever pumas were seen.
Eventually, after mule deer found refuge from hunting and proliferated among the urban sprawl around fast-growing western cities, pumas following the deer population furtively recolonized practically the whole of the west. The net effect is that pumas are probably now more abundant west of the Mississippi than ever before, with the largest puma populations thriving in proximity to some of the largest cities, notably Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Denver.
Pumas never recovered in the east, however, despite the explosive growth of the Virginia white-tailed deer population throughout their range over the past half century, because the seed stock to rebuild the eastern puma population no longer existed. The St. Croix cougar was roadkilled in Connecticut in Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection photo.
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