Part 4 "Coming Soon" Sue Morse Presentation at Pittsfield IP: 50.204.144.106 Posted on February 16, 2016 at 06:39:22 PM by weather01089
PART 4
Sue Morse presumably has a well constructed thesis which explains her views on the extinction controversy but she didn’t express it with any clarity in Pittsfield. At the conclusion of the show, she suggested that the USFW should develop an eastern cougar recovery program. That’s a noble proposal, for sure, but most of her comments during the show implied the eastern cougar may not have survived due to hunting and habitat loss in the last century. And Sue pointed out that Culver determined that all NA subspecies are virtually indistinguishable. If that’s true then there is no distinct eastern subspecies-only North American pumas. If they were all shot out over the last few centuries as the USFW suggests or if there is no identifiable subspecies as Culver has shown, then which cougar does Sue Morse propose we develop a recovery program for? Eastern ones? North American ones? Canadian ones? Or should we just let them recover on their own which they seem to be doing with some success in eastern Canada without any human intervention.
Lastly, and perhaps just as important, mountain lions aren’t “coming soon” to New England (like in a year or two), despite what promoters of this program implied; they’re already here. Morse tacitly acknowledged this with her comments throughout the presentation. She’s just scratching the surface. Recovery programs are on the minds of lots of cougar watchers but there are problems with this kind of scheme. If we were to identify eastern cougars in Ontario and bring them to NE to reestablish native cougar populations or if we were to release cougars box trapped in Montana or some other western states as ReWilding indicates it wants to do, these newcomers would be competing with resident lions that have already established home ranges here. In the case of Eastern Canada, this would mean trucking captured pumas from Ontario and Quebec to Massachusetts, for example, where they would be released into the Berkshires. Here they would come in contact with other members of the species whose ancestors (some) presumably dispersed from the same Canadian provinces decades before. Conflicts might result over possession of territories between residents and new comers. Local mountain lion populations would be higher but what’s the point of doing this?
The government takes a different position which complicates any explanation of this controversy even further. Federal officials acknowledged that mountain lions are already present in the Northeast. They don’t believe they are eastern cougars. And they don’t know where they came from. Unlike most of the scientific community, the USFW doesn’t accept Culver’s findings. They insist a cougar subspecies did exist at one time and occupied much of the East in the historic period but the agency claims the eastern subspecies disappeared about 78 years ago. To underscore this point they’ve declared the eastern cougar extinct and they announced plans to take them off the Endangered Species list. Realistically, the chances of the USFW developing a recovery plan at this stage of the game are slim and none. Having Sue Morse, John Laundre or anyone else for that matter challenge the government's position on extinction or recovery won't be enough to get the USFW to reverse course. Federal officials aren’t going to be persuaded to develop a recovery plan to restore native eastern cougars which they believe have been extinct since 1938. Now what?
When you consider all these factors, her comments on the recovery of cougars in the East are a mixed bag. What message is Morse sending to residents of New England about the presence of mountain lions in the Northeast, anyway? Does she agree with Rabinowitz that a population of mountain lions exists in the region that are breeding and able to maintain themselves? She can’t have it both ways; either she thinks pumas have established home ranges in a number of locations throughout the region or she doesn’t. Morse needs to state her position on any recovery proposals being contemplated as well as expressing her views on natural re-colonization by cougars from outside the region in clear and uncompromising terms that audiences will understand.
“Coming Soon” is a catchy title for a talk on mountain lions in the Berkshires but it doesn’t adequately describe the situation in New England, unless, of course, the sponsors meant mountain lions would be “coming soon” to people’s backyards on the outskirts of Burlington, Springfield, Albany and other major cities in the region. Cougars do that sort of thing routinely in places like Salt Lake City or San Diego. In fact, they go right into the heart of major Western cities. The same things are going to start happening around here. My guess is that “coming soon” will happen a lot “sooner” than the audience in the Boland Theater in Pittsfield has been lead to believe.