By Andy Ostmeyer
aostmeyer@joplinglobe.com
Earlier this year, a young Barton County boy reported being attacked by a mountain lion.
“He was knocked off his feet, he claimed, and actually dragged by his sleeve by a mountain lion,” said James Dixon, a wildlife damage biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation.
It’s Dixon’s job to check on such reports, and this time, the boy also claimed he had managed to stab the animal with a pocket knife.
Both the coat and the knife were sent to a laboratory to test for DNA evidence, but none was confirmed.
Although attacks are rare, Dixon said reports of cougars are increasingly common in Missouri, and they’re also growing throughout the Midwest.
“We get thousands — I’m talking literally thousands — of reports each year,” Dixon said.
Many come after heavy snows when people report finding large tracks, but those almost always turn out to be cases of misidentification: bobcats, dogs and even house cats.
Still, there have been some positive identifications in Missouri.
“Across the entire state, we have had 10 confirmed mountain lions since 1994,” said Dixon.
Some mountain lions, which also are called cougars and pumas, may be making their way into the Midwest by migrating from the Black Hills of South Dakota, which has a stable population, or perhaps from west Texas.
A cougar was shot and killed by police in Bossier City, La., in December. In April 2008, Chicago police shot and killed a 122-pound cougar in the city’s North Side. And in 2007, the first documented cougar in Kansas in more than 100 years was killed near Medicine Lodge.
In Missouri, cougars have been hit by cars in Kansas City and Fulton, captured on game cameras, and treed by hunting dogs in one instance.
The closest to Joplin was a confirmed sighting in Christian County in the winter of 1997, but Dixon said that animal, which was caught on video, was believed to have been a captured animal that either escaped or was released, based on its behavior.
Aside from a small population in south Florida, Texas and the Black Hills have been the eastern boundary of the cougar’s breeding range.
Like Missouri, Wisconsin game managers get scores of reported sightings each year and have to determine which are false.
Only two cougars have been confirmed in the state. The cougar killed in Chicago was seen months earlier in the Milton area of Wisconsin’s Rock County, 100 miles away, in January 2008.
Ken Jonas, a wildlife biologist supervisor with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said the only ways to confirm sightings are with photos, good tracks or other physical evidence. In the case of the confirmed sightings, blood, hair, urine and droppings were recovered.
Researchers learned a lot from the cat that roamed the Milton area for three months before being shot, said Eric Anderson, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
“Here’s a cat wandering across the landscape of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, a fairly heavily populated area, and nobody saw it,” he said.
Male cougars like that have been moving out from the Black Hills. Anderson said an estimated 20 to 25 young males are believed to leave there each year, looking for females as well as food. Some wander hundreds of miles.
He expects Wisconsin will eventually have resident cougars.
Dixon said the animals are shy and secretive, and rarely seen, let alone confirmed.
Still, the department takes the reports seriously and will investigate when there is some evidence left behind, such as tracks or a kill. And the prey base has grown in Missouri and other states, which have large deer populations.
“We do know that occasionally a mountain lion does wander into Missouri, but we do not believe we have a reproducing population,” Dixon said. Only one female was identified among the 10 confirmed sightings in the state, and no cubs have ever been found.
Dixon and others say that if their states had breeding populations, they would expect more cougars to be killed on roads and found feeding on livestock, and more evidence would be found in areas where the animals spent time, Jonas said. South Dakota, said Dixon, which has a much lower road density, has a much higher percentage of road kills.
The Missouri Department of Conservation also has established a Mountain Lion Response Team, which goes to sites and collects evidence when a credible report that might offer hard evidence is filed.
Jeff Beringer, large mammal biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation and a member of the response team, confirmed that sightings are extremely rare, even for biologists and experienced outdoorsmen. He said he has been on tracking teams in New Mexico and has received additional training in the Black Hills, yet, he added: “I have never seen one in the wild.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Last natives
Prior to 1994, the last mountain lion documented in Missouri was in 1927. They were gone from Iowa by 1867 and from Nebraska by 1890. Until recently, they were last seen in Wisconsin in 1908 and in Kansas in 1904.
