Cougar

The cougar is one animal wearing many names — mountain lion in the Rockies, puma in South America, panther in Florida, catamount in New England. It has the largest range of any wild land mammal in the Americas, and it does the whole thing in near silence.

Overview

Cougars live almost everywhere in the Western Hemisphere that holds deer and cover: the coniferous forests of British Columbia, the deserts of Arizona, the swamps of Florida, the Patagonian steppe, and the high Andes. They vanished from eastern North America by the early 1900s but are now slowly moving back, with confirmed sightings pushing further east each decade.

Physical characteristics

A cougar is a lean, powerfully muscled cat with a small head, rounded ears, a long heavy tail, and a plain tawny coat (kittens are spotted). Males in the north can reach 100 kg; cougars near the equator are smaller. The hind legs are longer and more muscular than the front — the source of its extraordinary jumping ability.

Despite the “mountain lion” name and its size, the cougar is not a member of the roaring-cat genus Panthera. It purrs like a house cat, and instead of roaring it produces chirps, whistles, and a piercing scream — often mistaken for a woman in distress — used mainly by females in oestrus.

Diet and hunting

Cougars are ambush predators and deer specialists: mule deer and white-tailed deer make up the bulk of the diet across most of the range, supplemented by elk calves, bighorn sheep, rodents, rabbits, raccoons, and, in South America, guanaco and small camelids.

The hunt is a stalk to within a few bounds, an explosive rush, and a killing bite to the base of the skull or the throat. A cougar then drags the carcass to cover, buries it under leaves and debris — “caching” — and returns to feed over several days, which is why finding a partly buried deer is a classic sign of cougar activity.

Behaviour and life cycle

Cougars are solitary and territorial. Males hold large ranges overlapping those of several females and mark boundaries with scrapes and scent. Females raise litters of two to four kittens alone in a rocky or brushy den; the kittens open their eyes at around ten days, start following the mother to kills at two months, and disperse at one to two years — young males sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres to find unclaimed territory.

Threats and conservation

The cougar is listed as Least Concern overall, with a stable-to-declining trend, but the picture is uneven:

• The Florida panther, an isolated subpopulation, fell to fewer than 30 animals in the 1990s, suffering from inbreeding until a genetic rescue with Texas cougars revived it; it remains Endangered and hemmed in by highways and development.
• Regulated hunting across the western United States and parts of South America.
• Habitat fragmentation by roads and sprawl, which isolates populations and causes deadly vehicle collisions.
• Retaliatory killing over livestock and pets.

Where cougars have connected habitat and legal protection, they are resilient and expanding — one of the few large predators quietly regaining ground in North America.