Re(3): Two More RECORDER articles from recent weeks IP: 68.172.220.212 Posted on January 31, 2015 at 05:11:16 PM by Chris
Good day, Weather.
Document is simply a synonym for confirmed evidence. Your claim of "over two dozen individual cougars DNA'd in Michigan" is a form of precise documentation.
A wild female has not been confirmed in the Midwest (MN, IA, MO, IL, WI, MI, IN) in 15 years. In addition to photographs, scat, tracks, and deer kills, 21 cougars have been killed or captured in the Midwest since 2000, all of them 2 year-old male dispersers. The CT cat was the oldest disperser at 3; why have none been older, mature males? And more curiously, since the ratio of adult females to adult males in a breeding population is 2 - 3 females to 1 male, might one not expect 2 - 3 times the number of females (40 - 60) killed or captured in the Midwest since 2000, and not 0? Perhaps there are no kills or captures of females in the Midwest because breeding has not been confirmed in the Midwest, because females tend to stay much closer to where they're born. And the closest evidence of cougar breeding (females confirmed with kittens) to Michigan is the Niobrara River Valley, Nebraska, still west of the Missouri River - 700 miles from the Michigan UP.
The Craftsbury confirmation remains disputed. From the Cougar Network: "VF&WD sent the scat to the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife's forensics lab for analysis. Microscopic hair recognition tests confirmed that hair in the scat came from mountain lions. Subsequent DNA tests indicated that the scat came from a coyote. The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department suspected that a mix-up of samples in the labs likely accounted for the inconsistent results and stood by its original assessment. Due to these conflicting results, The Cougar Network considers this incident to be inconclusive." ECF's eastern confirmation paper presented at the 2000 Austin,TX Mountain Lion Workshop included track evidence with cougar foot hairs found in the Craftsbury scat. The Maine confirmation was a single observation of a female and one kitten whose tracks were later confirmed by a Maine state biologist. Either way, one VT scat/track confirmation in 1994, and one Maine confirmation of mother/kitten tracks 15 years ago, are not the kind of evidence confirmed exponentially where one finds even the smallest of breeding populations.
Breeding evidence spread clearly from the source colony in the Black Hills into the Nebraska Panhandle, and lately to the Niobrara River Valley and the Wildcat Hills. Dispersal from the Black Hills into Nebraska was recorded largely incidentally - without having to search for evidence - by cats hit, trapped, shot, wandering into towns and cities, and photographed on random wildlife cams, until kittens were first confirmed on the ground in 2007. Just 7 years from that first evidence of breeding in the Pine Ridge National Forest, Nebraska determined there were enough adult cougars in the Pine Ridge (22) to start a hunting season in 2014.
If breeding was so easy to track in Nebraska from the first kittens to an inaugural hunt in 7 years (not to mention confirmations of breeding in 2014 in those two new nurseries), why has there been nothing confirmed in VT since 1994, or Maine since 2000?
Please cite your source that there have been over 24 individual cougar DNA confirmations in Michigan (my search found 26 Michigan confirmations as of November 2014, not 26 individuals; multiple confirmations of individual cats are routine). If more than 24 individuals indeed have been confirmed by DNA, then the sex of the individuals should also have been determined (no need to look under the hood when you've got the blue-print), as DNA research confirmed the sex and number of cougars in Nebraska's Pine Ridge National Forest: http://www.starherald.com/news/dna-identifies-mountain-lions-in-pine-ridge/article_3e22d960-56e7-5379-a0a4-4e9547baf420.html
A confirmed female in the Michigan UP - 700 miles from the closest confirmed breeding female on the prairie - would be huge news.