A female puma with her three kittens spotted on a trail camera in Minnesota marked a historic moment, according to scientists. The sighting in March was the first time in more than a century that pumas have been observed breeding in the state.
The recording 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,” VWP said in a statement.
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.
“Without a doubt, our best trail camera capture yet,” VWP said.
Pumas (Puma concolor), 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, researchers say.
“We have not detected other females moving across the landscape and so for one to show up and then have kittens is a pretty big step,” Dan Stark, a large carnivore specialist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, told Mongabay in a video call.
Stark said it’s too soon to say if the puma family in Minnesota represents “the potential for a breeding population to establish or it’s just a one-off event.”
Biologists don’t yet know the gender of the kittens but believe they are between 7 and 9 months old, likely old enough to make it to adulthood.
“They’re not in a high road density area and based on their size and their ability to climb up a tree they’re probably pretty capable of avoiding wolves at this point,” Stark said.
VWP has other camera traps in the region to monitor wildlife so the pumas may get photographed again. Stark said he’s hoping to collect fecal samples of the cats to determine gender and how they might be related to lone males in the area. There’s also the possibility of radio collaring the family, Stark said.
“We haven’t had a lot of experience with cougars in Minnesota. So, some of it we’re learning as we go,” he said.
Banner image: A screenshot of two puma kittens in Minnesota. Image courtesy of Voyageurs Wolf Project.
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