“A mother puma with three kittens was recently spotted in Minnesota, the first evidence in over a century of pumas breeding in the state,” reports The Doomslayer.
Mongabay explains that the discovery
was the result of an unrelated project with deer. Scientists with the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project (VWP) detected that one of their radio-collared deer was dead. Upon investigation, they found, “the carcass buried under a pile of leaves on a hillside — a tell-tale sign of feline predation.”
At first, the researchers suspected a bobcat killed the deer, so they set up two trail cameras. They were surprised to find an adult female puma and her three kittens instead…
Pumas, also known as cougars, mountain lions or panthers, have nearly as many names as habitats. Before settlers arrived in the New World, the cats could be found all the way from the subarctic in Canada to South America, from the Amazon to Patagonia.
They ranged across the entire U.S. before hunting and habitat loss drove the largest remaining breeding populations to a few pockets of wilderness in the country’s west.
There have been occasional sightings of pumas in the eastern U.S., such as in Connecticut. However, those were likely either escaped pets or lone males in search of a territory and a mate. Females tend to stay close to where they were born.
75 percent fewer cats are being killed in animal shelters.
Lions are proliferating in Gujarat.
An endangered flat-headed cat was recently discovered.
Cheetas recently returned to India. India has also doubled its tiger population.
Jaguars are growing in number in Mexico and Argentina. Bobcats recently returned to New Jersey after being absent from the state for a half century.
