saltysack
03-19-2016, 13:23
http://appvoices.org/2016/02/17/cougar/
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GoldenBear
03-19-2016, 16:31
It appears that the lack of any effort to permit -- or perhaps the effort to prevent -- a breeding colony of cougars getting from the Black Hills into the Appalachians has "failed."
The major limiting factor making the above difficult is that females have almost never been found east of the Mississippi River. There could be a thousand males who make the trip but, without more females than existed in Florida, cougars WILL not and CAN not return to the Appalachians. The fact that one female has been confirmed as having made this journey gives hope that others may follow.
For more info on CONFIRMED sightings of wild cougars*, check these URLs.
http://www.cougarnet.org/confirmations/
http://www.easterncougar.org/pages/beyondsightings.htm
Note the quote from the first URL:
Where cougars are well established, any knowledgeable individual can find evidence in a few days. Yet, our own field searches, sometimes within hours or a day of a sighting, have failed to produce evidence, and years pass between confirmations.
* ie, 10,000 sightings of a large cat would mean nothing unless it is combined with the (very easily obtained) physical evidence of a cougar's presence. And even the presence of a real cougar is meaningless if it's simply an illegal pet released into the wild.