Ghost cat. Catamount. Puma. Painter.
Panther. Mountain lion. Cougar. The many
names given the nation's largest cat
convey the mystery surrounding this
solitary hunter. But the variety of names
also demonstrates the cougar's original
distribution across the North American
continent and from southern Canada to
the tip of South America.
Once the most widely distributed land
mammal in the Western Hemisphere,
cougars have been eliminated in most of
their native habitat. Only western cougars
still live in large enough numbers to
maintain breeding populations, and they
live on wild lands in the western United
States and Canada. Observations of
western cougars provide biologists with
information for the cats that once lived
east of the Mississippi.
Although generally presumed extinct in
the wild, eastern cougars remain
protected by the Endangered Species Act.
Eastern cougars historically ranged from
Michigan, southern Ontario, eastern
Canada and Maine south to South
Carolina and west across Tennessee. At
one time, they lived in every Eastern state
in a variety of habitats including coastal
marshes, mountains and forests.
The cougar's Latin name gives a clue to its
appearance; “concolor” means with one
color, and adult cougars' fur is a uniform
red-brown or gray-brown. Cougars have
long, slender bodies with very long tails
and broad, round heads with erect,
rounded ears. Adult cats average from
6 feet (females) to 8 feet (males) long,
including their tail. Males, at around 140
pounds, are larger than females at about
105 pounds. Cougars can swim, climb
trees and leap horizontally and vertically
equally well. Eastern cougars' primary
prey was white-tailed deer, but they also
hunted eastern elk (now extinct) and
porcupines and other smaller mammals.
Cougars usually do not chase down their
prey, but stalk and ambush; a cougar may
leap as far as 20 feet onto a deer's back
and can kill an animal with one bite to the
neck. One cougar consumes a deer every
week to 10 days, or more frequently if a
female is feeding cubs. Cougars have no
natural enemies, only humans.
Cougars are mostly lone animals, except
for mothers raising cubs and the time a
pair spends together while mating. Males
may occupy a range of more than 25
square miles and females between 5 and
20 square miles. Both females and males
defend home territories. Cougars begin
breeding at two or three years old and
breed once every two or three years.
Females initiate courtship, and produce a
litter of two to three kittens after a three-month
gestation. The kittens reach 10
pounds at eight weeks, and may weigh 30
to 45 pounds at six months. Females spend
18 to 24 months raising cubs to maturity.
Cougars live an average of eight years.
Early settlers perceived the cougar as a
danger to livestock and humans and a
competitor for wild game. With bounties
set by states, the eastern cougar was
hunted and trapped relentlessly until they
were extirpated throughout most of their
range. Cougars were gone from much of
the East by the late 1800s. At the same
time, much of their habitat was eliminated
through deforestation, which, along with
hunting, also reduced the population and
range of white-tailed deer. Although the
forests and the deer have returned in the
East in recent decades, conflicting land
uses, fragmented habitat, roads, diseases
and parasites from domestic animals, and
expanding human populations will likely
prevent cougars from returning to most of
their former range. Habitat able to
support small populations may still occur
in some of the larger undeveloped tracts
of forest in the East.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
MARCH 3,1849
U.S.DEPARTMENT OFTHE INTERIOR
Eastern Cougar
Felis concolor couguar
Cougars in the Western Hemisphere
were originally classified into 32
subspecies. Recent genetic research
instead identifies six groups along
geographic locations, five of which are
in Central or South America. Some
scientists now claim that North
American cougars are genetically the
same. An isolated population, like the
Florida panther, can develop some
genetic differences through in-breeding.
The Florida panther is the
only breeding population of cougar
east of the Mississippi.
While confirmed cougars sightings have occurred recently in the wild in the East,
there is currently no physical evidence documenting the continued existence of a
population of wild eastern cougars. The cougars examined in the Northeast in the
past 70 years are likely released or escaped captives. Some cats had a South
American genetic profile. Some may be animals that dispersed into the region from
western populations. Confirmed cougar sightings have increased in the Midwest
and Great Lakes states in recent years. Some believe that a small residual
population of wild cougars persisted in the Canadian Maritime Provinces where
there has also been recent confirmed evidence of cougars.
Northeast Region
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
300 Westgate Center Drive
Hadley, MA 01035
413/253 8200
http://northeast.fws.gov
Federal Relay Service
for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
1 800/877 8339
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
http://www.fws.gov
1 800/344 WILD
October 2005
illustrations: Robert Savannah
