Cougar News

Two cougars wandered into urban areas recently.  One became a celebrity; the other tragically died in a hail of bullets!  It seems people in the Midwest and East have a lot to learn from their fellow citizens to the West about tolerance and respect for cougars!  The celebrity story shows that cougars can make good neighbors, being less of a threat than some not-so-wild life, including humans.  The tragedy shows the Midwest still has a long way to go.

What happened to the Chicago cougar?

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/79362462.html

KOMOnews.com

Tracking the cougar that lurked around Discovery Park

By Molly Shen

SEATTLE — The cougar that shut down the city’s biggest city park last fall has settled in a new home territory.

The big cat captivated local residents’ attention when it tried to make Discovery Park its home. Since then, wildlife agents have been tracking the animal.

The 2½-year-old male cougar was only the second in history to make its way into Discovery Park, which is why officials wanted to keep a close eye the animal they appropriately named “Discovery.”

But from the moment the cougar ran into the Cascade Foothills above Monroe, watching him became a desk job. State Wildlife Biologist Rich Beausoleil gets updates on Discovery in his e-mail inbox.

Discovery is the first cougar in the state outfitted with a collar that sends daily cell phone signals plotting his location.

“Took the south fork of the Tolt, and you see all these clear cuts over here. He avoided all of those clear cuts, all of the towns of Duvall and Carnation, and ultimately North Bend. Decided to stay quite a ways from there,” said Beausoleil of the signals received.

Discovery went 67 miles in two weeks, crossing Snoqualmie Pass and finally settling in cougar country in Eastern Washington.

“He’s doing exactly what a cougar should do,” Beausoleil said. “And it goes to show even though he came close to people, you can’t paint cougars with a brush and call them a problem cat. He just wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The tracking collar will rot away and fall off in about two years. When that happens, Beausoleil will stop getting daily e-mails from Discovery. And that will mean success.

The wildlife department closely watched a similar situation in Bismarck, North Dakota.

When a cougar went into a populated area there, agents shot and killed it, sparking outrage among many residents who wanted it relocated.

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Here in Washington, most people praised the department for making an urban cougar wild again.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009818853_cougar07m.html

The Seattle Times

Discovery Park’s cougar is captured, released into wild

The cougar that’s been prowling Discovery Park in Magnolia for about a week was captured early Sunday after being tracked and tranquilized by wildlife officers.

By Lornet Turnbull and Christine Clarridge
Seattle Times staff reporters

Related

• Elusive cougar captured in Magnolia’s Discovery Park, already released into the wild
• Gallery | Discovery Park cougar caught and re-located
• Magnolia Voice | Photos: Cougar captured and released into wild
• Magnolia Voice: Cougar will send text messages

The young male cougar — whose presence in Seattle’s Discovery Park captured the city’s attention for days — was last seen Sunday trotting a little unsteadily up a gravel service road deep in the foothills of the Cascades, the loud sounds of a barking bear dog in his wake.

“This was about as textbook as they come,” wildlife biologist Brian Kertson said as the 140-pound cat rounded a bend in the road and disappeared.

“He’s now out here where cougars are meant to roam,” said Kertson, who runs a cougar-rescue project. “… at least out here he has a fighting chance.”

Officer Nicholas Jorg of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, who was hunting in Discovery Park with hound dogs, captured the 2-½- to 3-year-old cat near the park’s Indian Cultural Center around 2 a.m. Sunday.

Officials say the cat was in great physical condition. A GPS collar will send automatic updates on his location twice a day — allowing officials to detect if he tries to return to an urban area.

They say they believe the cat may have followed the rail lines south along the shoreline, the same route bears have been known to use to get to the park. “He made a left when he should have gone right,” Kertson said.

Officials reopened Discovery Park around noon Sunday, three days after closing it following initial cougar sightings.

Jan Pecoraro, who lives near the park and jogs there every day, was among a small group of people who came to see the animal that had created such a fuss.

“He’s absolutely beautiful,” Pecoraro said. “I’m sure he’s as afraid to be here as we were to have him here the last few days.”

Using information from the last sighting, Jorg and the hound dogs tracked the cougar during Saturday night’s rainstorm. He said he initially worried that overflowing storm drains would wash away the cougar’s trail.

But, he said, “They caught his scent, and once they lined up his trail, he treed.”

The barking dogs cornered the cat up a big-leaf maple, and Jorg shot a tranquilizer dart into one of his rear legs, bringing him down. “He was a sweetheart,” Jorg said. “He did not show any aggression whatsoever. I’m assuming he was pretty scared.”

Still woozy around midmorning Sunday at the park, the cat lay in a cage, unimpressed, as cameras of all sorts — TV, still and cellphone — zoomed in.

Officials said they wanted to wait until the tranquilizer wore off before transporting him into the wild.

An SUV caravan made its way through rainy streets east of Everett toward the mountains. At a pit stop at a gas station in Monroe, a small cluster of people gathered to view the animal in his cage and take pictures. The cat occasionally turned his back on them, at times baring its teeth.

Once in the mountains, officials let loose Cash, a Karelian bear dog, which barked loudly and aggressively at the cage.

It’s the same method they use when they return bears to the wild, creating for the animal a negative association with humans and the urban environment so they won’t want to return.

For several seconds after the cage door was opened, the cougar, feebly baring his teeth at the barking dog, just lay there.

Then he bounded up a service road and was gone.

It was not the first time a cougar has been captured in Discovery Park. In 1981, a 110-pound, 2-year-old cougar was tranquilized and taken to a game farm in Tacoma. It was later released outside Enumclaw.

Cougars are the largest members of the cat family in North America. The state cougar population in 2008 was estimated at 2,000 to 2,500 animals.