Mountain lions ( Puma concolor also called cougars, pumas, or catamounts) historically roamed most of the Western Hemisphere, and had one of the largest ranges of any mammal in the world. This cat is the reason I have been studying the range expansion of mountain lions for more than a decade.Įven though it was a surprise to hear about a cougar traversing the prairies of the midwestern United States in 2004, it would not have been so surprising 200 years ago. Fourteen months later, I was in the thick of figuring it out. It seemed that something was brewing and that this cat was an important clue. What’s more, this incident was not the first time a mountain lion had appeared outside the American West. Its journey of more than 1,100 kilometers represented, at the time, the longest dispersal distance ever recorded for a mountain lion. This cat-eventually dubbed the Red Rocks Cat, or at least that’s what I called it-originated in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
I still think about how amazing the possibility is that a mountain lion and I, someone who would end up studying the species’ recolonization of its former habitats, could have been within kilometers of each other in one of the most unlikely of places. Mountain lions were the last thing on our minds. I traveled in a van for nearly three weeks with 19 other students and two professors, searching for snakes, skinks, and other wildlife while learning about the grassland ecosystems of the mixed-grass prairies. In May 2004 I had been on a field ecology trip to finish out my junior year at Minnesota State University, Mankato. The journey the cat took, according to its radio collar, led me to realize that only weeks before I learned about it, I may have shared the same space with that very cat-on the prairies of Kansas, of all places. The 52-kilogram, 2.5-year-old male mountain lion that met its unfortunate demise on some railroad tracks in Red Rocks, Oklahoma, in late May of 2004 was accompanied by a story-told by the radio collar it just so happened to be wearing.
As it turns out, this poor cat changed my life.
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