Chicago cougar could have come from Wisconsin

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DeKALB - Imagine my surprise when I turned on the local news on Monday and saw Chicago police had shot a cougar on the North Side. It was just a few months back, the sixth of February to be exact, that the Illinois Department of Natural Resources issued a press release regarding cougars.  The story ran in the Outdoors News and Notes the following week and I'm sure received little fanfare. The IDNR was responding to several cougar photos that had surfaced on the internet. The photos were supposedly taken in Illinois. At about the same time, Doug Fendry, a wildlife supervisor for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources had been tracking a cougar sighting in his state. A Wisconsin resident encountered a cougar in the second story of their barn. The cougar jumped out of a hole in the barn to avoid contact, but with fresh snow, the animal left a perfect set of tracks. Fendry took photos of the tracks and collected DNA evidence. The WDNR tracked the cougar from January to March. So was the cougar shot by Chicago Police Monday the one from Wisconsin? “If it was the same cougar,” Fendry said. “And that is a big if. It is likely it turned southeast and didn't realize it had headed into an urban area and didn't turn around, there are no road maps for the cougar.” There is a DNA comparison being done to determine if it was the same animal. Fendry said young male cougars that leave the Black Hills of South Dakota tend to follow the Missouri River. Missouri is a surrounding state that has the most number of cougar sightings, the Cougar Network, a non-profit research organization dedicated to studying cougar-habitat relationships and the role of cougars in ecosystems has a map to track cougar sightings in North America (http://cougarnet.org/bigpicture.html). “A big male can travel large distances,” Fendry said. “As they travel they disperse and follow natural corridors like rivers because that is where the food is.” So is the reclusive predator making a return to Illinois after nearly 200 years of living West of the Mississippi River, and should the public be concerned? “The cougar in Wisconsin was here a couple of months and never bothered anyone,” Fendry said. “It jumped two stories to avoid contact.” Fendry understands the actions of the Chicago Police. A wild animal could be unpredictable in an urban area. The WDNR contingency plan for cougars is the similar to how they deal with wolves. If the cougar had went after a person or livestock it would have to be captured. Rocky foothills and mountainous areas are a cougar's preferred habitat. They live in an ecosystem capable of supporting populations of deer, elk, small mammals and large rodents. Which doesn't sound like the North Side of Chicago, which will keep scientists busy trying to answer how this cougar seems to have lost its way. As for those photos, a Madison television station called Fendry in to see if they were legitimate. “I went over to their computer and got on the internet,” Fendry said. “The pictures were obviously bogus. They were shot by colleagues in western states. We joked with each other that their pictures had become famous on the internet.”