A glamorous killer returns to its ancestral hunting grounds:
Long ago the Inca called them puma, but today — though they belong to only one species — they have many names. In Arizona they are known as mountain lions; in Florida they are panthers, and elsewhere in the South they are called painters. When they roamed New England, they were called catamounts. In much of the Midwest they are known as cougars, and that is the name everyone understands.
Until relatively recently, they were mainly a memory. All but exterminated east of the Rockies by 1900, they were treated as “varmints” in most Western states until the late ’60s and could be shot on sight. In Maine, the last catamount was killed in 1938.
But today Puma concolor is back on the prowl. That is one of the great success stories in wildlife conservation, but also a source of concern among biologists and other advocates, for their increasing numbers make them harder to manage — and harder for people to tolerate. No reliable estimate exists for the cougar population at its lowest point, before the 1970s, but there are now believed to be more than 30,000 in North America. They have recolonized the Black Hills of South Dakota, the North Dakota Badlands and the Pine Ridge country of northwestern Nebraska.
There are increasing reports of sightings in 11 Midwestern states, as well as in Arkansas and Louisiana. A young male tripped a trail camera in the Missouri Ozarks on Feb. 2, and dogs treed one in Minnesota in March.
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The center of cougar genetic diversity is in Brazil, but the Western Hemisphere has six robust subspecies in all. The Florida panther was listed as endangered in 1995, when eight Texas female cougars were released in South Florida in a last effort to save them from extinction. It worked. The Florida panther, it turned out, is a North American cougar whose kinked tails, heart defects, small litters and short lives were consequences of prolonged inbreeding. From fewer than 30 in 1995, the panther population in southwestern Florida has grown to more than 150.
Some people ask, why would anyone want to infest the nation with maneaters?