The blog of the Cougar Rewilding Foundation
Posted in California, Co-existence, Education, Monitoring, Preservation, Radio Collar Tracking on Apr 18th, 2013
Surrounded by several million people, the Santa Cruz Mountains along the Bay Area peninsula – an area about half the size of the 700,000 acre Catskill Park in southern New York State - supports about 30 adult cougars and 40 kittens. The Santa Cruz’s largest protected area is the 18,000 acre Big Basin Redwood State Park. [...]
Posted in California, Co-existence, Education, Government Agency, Preservation, Radio Collar Tracking on Apr 16th, 2013
The Santa Ana Mountains of Southern California between LA and San Diego maintains a cougar population despite continued poaching, roadkills, fragmentation and habitat loss. One of the first urban cougar populations ever to be studied, twenty years later, Paul Beier’s Santa Ana cats are still holding their own. Orange County Register
Posted in Arizona, Co-existence, Education, Government Agency, Video DVD on Apr 16th, 2013
Terrific video and commentary from AZGFD featuring Brian Jansen. Mountain Lions in America called Jansen a “straight shooter” among muzzled cougar biologists. His SDSU dissertation is one of the responsible studies out of South Dakota.
Posted in Eastern Cougar, Education, Florida, Florida Panther, Pennsylvania, Unconfirmed Sightings on Apr 6th, 2013
Reviewing pics like these from Wellsboro, PA used to be our bread and butter. But 14 years of looking at hundreds of bobcat and housecat photographs reported as cougars, with only one cougar confirmation from Nova Scotia to Mississippi crossing our desks (Greenwich, CT 2011) since 1999, helped us realize the ubiquity of misidentifications. Compare [...]
Posted in Co-existence, Education, Hunting, Livestock attacks, Preservation, Washington on Feb 27th, 2013
Washington State University’s Large Carnivore Conservation Lab has provided 15 years of research on cougar social dynamics. As we’ve pointed out previously, their results have demonstrated how sport hunting (which tends to target ordering big toms) shreds the cougar’s social network and increases conflicts with pets, livestock and us. The conclusion to this video, which [...]
Posted in California, Co-existence, Education, Encounters, Government Agency on Feb 11th, 2013
Despite repeated claims by misinformed public wildlife servants in the East, cougars can and do coexist with us along the edges of western urban landscapes; have been for thirty years in California. This article from the Mountain Lion Foundation details both the conflicts and the solutions being developed for coexistence. The Mountain Lion Foundation by [...]
Posted in Education, Government Agency, Hunting, Preservation on Jan 21st, 2013
In an essay echoing our most recent newsletter, hunter, ecologist and essayist George Wuerthner details what’s wrong with state management of predators, a sentiment shared by cougar hunter Bob Speirs here. We’ll offer alternatives to Pittman-Robertson funding and how to more equitably reform this mess in our next newsletter. The Wildlife News State Agency Game [...]
Posted in Co-existence, Cougar Rewilding Foundation, Decline of Eastern Forests, Deer Problems, Eastern Cougar, Education, New York, Preservation on Jan 8th, 2013
For Immediate Release, January 8, 2013 Contact: Dr. John Laundre’, SUNY Oswego, (315).529.3759 Christopher Spatz, Cougar Rewilding Foundation, (845).377.1034 Adirondack Park Could Support 350 Cougars Mountain Lions Would Restore Biodiversity to Ancestral Home CAMBRIDGE, Eng. – Re-evaluating a thirty year-old Adirondack cougar habitat study, the international conservation journal Oryx today published pioneering ecologist Dr. John Laundré’s The Feasibility of the [...]