Cougars: On the Trail of the Ghost Cat
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Anne Bolen
IN PRICKLY UNDERBRUSH ON THE NORTH RIM of Arizona’s Grand Canyon, Brandon Holton and his Australian-shepherd-mix dog Gus were looking for bodies—the remains of deer and other prey that cougars leave behind. A U.S. National Park Service wildlife biologist, Holton can tell much from the cats’ kill sites, from which prey they are eating and the health of the animals they consume to where the cats travel and how they behave.
Since 2003, the service has monitored more than 30 cougars in Grand Canyon National Park using infrared cameras and collars that transmit the cats’ global positioning system (GPS) locations from satellites to Holton’s inbox daily. If a cat stays in one location for days, Holton knows it has made a kill, and he will soon be scrambling up and down mountainsides to find what it has left behind. “It takes time to get into the mind of a cougar,” says Holton. “But that’s the fun part.”
Holton is partnering with U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist David Mattson, who is compiling data from several studies, gathered from hundreds of thousands of GPS satellite and radio-telemetry signals from collared mule deer, bighorn sheep, elk and more than 100 cougars in the areas of the Colorado Plateau straddling Arizona, Colorado and Utah. This is the first attempt to record cougar movements in real time on such an expansive scale, Mattson says. “We are trying to predict where they will be—the ways they orient themselves to the landscape as the environment changes.”
Human infrastructure is fragmenting cougar habitat, climate change is altering ecosystems and, in some cases, the cat’s prey has moved, increased or declined. Infrared cameras, satellites and genetic analyses are allowing scientists to slowly piece together where these elusive predators travel in this fluctuating world and what such sometimes surprising discoveries could mean for the survival of the United States’s largest wild cat.
Whether called a ghost cat, catamount, mountain lion or cougar, Puma concolor has the greatest range of any terrestrial carnivore in the Western Hemisphere. These cats inhabit western Canada, Central and South America, much of the western United States and southern Florida. They are active year-round in all types of terrain, from snowy alpines and dense forests to rocky deserts and muggy swamps. Though the cats once roamed throughout North America, unregulated killing and government-sponsored bounty hunts depleted the U.S. cougar population by the early 1900s, and with the exception of endangered Florida panthers (P. c. coryi), nearly eliminated them east of the Mississippi River. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally declared the eastern cougar (P. c. couguar) extinct in March 2011. ...
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