Local Women Attend Cougar Tracking Seminar

By Jane Greiner
Sun nature correspondent
Sandra Catlin of Honor and I recently attended the Cougar Tracking Seminar put on by the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy. Catlin has twice spotted a black cougar on the roads between her home and her job in Glen Arbor. Having seen a cougar with her own eyes (when they supposedly do not exist in Michigan) has sparked her interest in the elusive big cats.

At the seminar we learned that cougars were thought to be extinct in our state since 1906. Nevertheless, there have been numerous unofficial cougar sightings in both Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas in the years since that supposed “last cougar” was killed. The Conservancy estimates that there may actually be 50-80 cougars living in Michigan today. They can be found in state and national parks and forests, on Native American land, and on private land. There have been numerous sightings of big cats in our own Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
People have an unreasonable fear of cougars. Only last fall, a number of “kill permits” were issued in the Kalkaska area for big cats after some farm animals had been attacked.
The kill permits were clearly upsetting to Dennis Fijalkowski, Executive Director of the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy. “In two hundred years of recorded history, there has never been a cougar attack on a human” in Michigan, he said. He wants to educate the public about the cougar in Michigan so that no more kill permits are issued for our rarest of big predators.
The Conservancy is a tiny organization operating on a small budget, but its efforts are beginning to make a difference The Conservancy is doing everything it can to raise awareness, change perceptions, and help create a rational program to study, protect and manage these majestic creatures in Michigan..
As a first step in that direction, Dr Patrick Rusz, Director of Wildlife Programs for the Conservancy, has been able to document the existence of Michigan cougars through tracks, scat samples, and the few rare instances of private photos and videos. Two cougars were actually observed during the fieldwork in Benzie and Roscommon Counties. That scientific work has gone a long way to prove the existence of cougars in both Upper and Lower Michigan.
In addition to his own study, Dr. Rusz noted that hundreds of sightings have been unofficially reported in the Sleeping Bear Dunes area, alone, since the National Park was established in 1972.
The Conservancy’s next goal is to prove that the Michigan cougar is a “wild, resident, and breeding population.” In other words, they need to show that current cougars are descendants of Michigan’s original cougars, that they live here and are not just passing through, and that they are an ongoing population. Once recognized as legitimate native Michigan cougars, the state and the DNR should recognize its interest in protecting our cougars.
To help with the cougar population study, the Conservancy is training volunteer trackers through the Cougar Tracking Seminar to identify cougar signs, record tracking data, photograph tracks and scat, and make plaster casts of tracks. For this effort they are providing “tracker training” for citizen volunteers like Sandra and me, for hunters, private groups, Native American tribes, park rangers and other interested state and federal officials.
This intensive training covers how to identify cougar tracks, kills, scat and scrapes, and how to document them when found. An extensive slide show presentation covers these areas thoroughly, and by the end of the day the audience is able to distinguish between cougar, bobcat, dog and bear tracks, which look similar at first glance.
Hands-on experience is provided as participants practice stirring up plaster of Paris and pouring a cast of an animal track. This is good practice for making a cast in the field. Everyone receives a Cougar Field Guide with sample drawings, photos and tools for recording tracks.
Seminar participants learn that the cougar can survive well in almost any habitat, from swampy wetlands to dry-desert regions and from flat woodlands to snow-covered mountains. Indeed, according to Dr. Rusz, cougars have “the largest distribution of any land animal in the world, other than humans.” Cougars can be found everywhere in the western hemisphere, from the southern tip of South America through Central America, the United States and Canada. There are none in the eastern hemisphere.
They are powerful, solitary animals. A cougar can leap 18 feet high and 35 feet horizontally. They are efficient killers of deer, their main food source. They generally attack by leaping on the animals back, knocking it off its feet and severing the neck vertebrae with a single, lethal bite.
The size of a cougar’s range is dictated by habitat. In Texas’s semi-arid country their range can be as large as 1600 square miles. The best guess for Michigan cougars, where large deer herd’s roam, is about 200 square miles. Dr. Rusz pointed out that the range is not necessarily round. A range might be 15 x 15 miles or 10 x 20 miles, or even stretch along a river.
Fijalkowski listed a number of inaccurate theories about the Michigan cougar sightings. They are not released pets. Even if they were all released into the wild, the few legal cougar pets in Michigan could not have produced the number of sightings that have been documented.
They are not always tan in color. In genetically isolated populations, black cougars would likely develop from black recessive genes. Fijalkowski said that “a small but significant number of sightings are of black animals.”
This information was especially interesting to Sandra Catlin who has seen a cougar on the roads between her home and her job in Glen Arbor on two different occasions. The big cats Caitlin saw looked black. And yet books and people told her that cougars “aren’t black.” Now she knows that what she saw could have been real and that “she is not crazy”.
Most importantly, they are not dangerous to people. Fijalkowski uses the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore to back that up. Clearly, one or more cougar has lived among millions of visitors each year in the Dunes area without a single incident. “People have nothing to fear from a well-fed, healthy cougar,” he said.
The next Cougar Tracking Seminar is scheduled for Saturday June 7.
In addition to the tracking seminars, the Conservancy is attempting to reach a broad segment of the general public with information about cougars. They want everyone to be able to recognize and understand cougars, without being afraid of them.
The Conservancy also offers a free 45-minute slide show for the general public called “Michigan is Cougar Country”. They hope to bring the slide show to the Philip Hart Visitor Center or another Sleeping Bear Dunes location.
Anyone who has seen a cougar or found good cougar tracks may contribute to the organization’s official sighting report forms.
Free brochures called “Living with Cougars in Michigan” will soon be available.
The Michigan Wildlife Conservancy can be reached at (517) 641-7677 and emailed at wildlife@miwildlife.org. On their website, www.miwildlife.org, you can learn about its programs and download “Cougar Investigation Reports,” where you can report your own cougar sightings.