For a century and a half there weren’t any wild cougars in Illinois, but the cougar shot to death by police in Roscoe Village last month was the third one discovered here in the last decade. The first, a four-to-six-year-old male, was hit by a train in Randolph County in 2000. The second was found by a bow hunter in the fall of 2004 not far from the Quad Cities. Within hours of the Roscoe Village incident, police were investigating another possible sighting near the Skokie Lagoons. Another call came in from Glencoe the next day, and a week later police responded to a report of a sighting in Stickney.
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When you separate the kernels of verified cougar sightings from the chaff of unreliable ones, the numbers are not huge, but they do indicate an increase in cougars making their way back into the nation’s corn and soybean belt, areas from which they were exterminated long ago. Now the midwest is going to have to decide what to do about them.
At one time cougars roamed coast-to-coast in the United States. Human settlement and development restricted their range, though they can still be found from the Andes to Canada. Their diet includes deer, elk, moose, rabbits, rodents, grass, and the occasional pet: Robert Busch writes in The Cougar Almanac that “one cougar killed in Fresno, California, had the remains of five domestic cats in its stomach.”
Despite human encroachment on their habitat, cougars appear to be thriving, perhaps because they’re often protected or can be hunted only during controlled seasons. The nonprofit research group Cougar Network (cougarnet.org) uses criteria including carcasses, DNA evidence, and verifiable photos and video to authenticate sightings. They’ve concluded that “the presence of a number of confirmations in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois in recent years suggests that transients are starting to reach those states from the adjacent prairie states which themselves are in the process of being repopulated.”
A restless cougar would be wiser to head for Missouri. Unlike Illinois, which offers no legislative protection for cougars, the Missouri Department of Conservation prohibits hunting them. Dave Hamilton, who directs the department’s’s Mountain Lion Response Team, says Missouri has enough habitat and more than adequate prey (there are roughly a million deer in the state) to support a small breeding population of cougars—”around 50 individuals”—but he’s pessimistic about the public’s acceptance of a large predator in the state. “We don’t have the habitat where lions could avoid human contact,” he says. “Lions could tolerate people more than people could tolerate lions.”
