Cougar Sport Kills Down, Hunting Quotas Heat Up
6 years and 3. South Dakota hunters have failed to reach the female cougar subquota for 6 consecutive years, and its total harvest limit in 3 years. In 2015, South Dakota hunters killed 22 female cougars; 43 cougars total. The female sub quota, or harvest limit, is 50. The total harvest limit is 75. After suggesting that South Dakota's 2010 - 2015 Mountain Lion Management Plan had achieved its goal of reducing significantly the Black Hills cougar population, South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks (SDGF&P) biologists recommended reducing the limits to 40 for females and 60 total, noting that even hunters were voicing concerns for cougar viability in the Hills. And while one SDGF&P Commissioner reinforced that consistently missing quotas is an indication of population decline, the commissioners voted in October to keep the current limits. Raising or maintaining sport hunting quotas while failing to meet years of current limits was a hot topic among game commissions across the West in 2015.
Though purporting to support 6200 cats - more than California's unhunted population - and despite getting nowhere near its annual cougar quota for 10 consecutive years, Oregon raised the quota by 193. While New Mexico hasn't reached even half its quota for years, the Land of Enchantment expanded cougar trapping on state trust/private deeded land, and raised the hunter bag-limit from 2 to 4. Missing its harvest objective every year since 1997 (p. 6), Utah expanded issuing cougar permits. North Dakota's cougar population has been dropping since 2011, but it's quotas have remained the same. Proposals to increase ungulate populations by the spurious act of raising cougar quotas in select regions of Washington and Colorado were stopped by governor decree in Washington and by watchdog groups in Colorado led by the Humane Society.
Some game commissions appear to think that reaching quotas is a matter of increasing killing opportunities, rather than reduced kill totals being a reflection of fewer cougars to hunt. Citing the usual discredited suspects on the bogeyman inventory - protecting livestock, reducing ungulate predation and human conflicts - what remains most disturbing is the near complete refusal of western game agencies to adapt to 21st century cougar research/management.
As it was designed to do, as the primary source of Prairie dispersers, the Black Hills management plan will continue to suppress the potential for recolonization into the Midwest. As we've been pointing out for years, male dispersal deep into the Midwest is exciting to chart but a red herring with respect to recolonization. Female dispersal is everything (10 females were killed in Nebraska alone in 2014 from a cougar population estimated at just 25). This year, 3 females have appeared east of the Prairie source colonies. 2 are dead. The 3rd, the first confirmed wild female east of the Mississippi River, her DNA traced to the Black Hills, has apparently survived being shot in September by a bowhunter. 2 dead, 1 shot (another female this month reached east/central Texas well east of the cougar's West Texas range before being shot). Tough odds, reinforcing the fact that a Midwest male disperser has not been found alive over the age of 3 in 25 years, despite now being protected in every Midwest state but Iowa. Cougar Rewilding Foundation (CRF) Vice President John Laundre's Phantoms of the Prairie central US habitat analysis predicted recolonization in Nebraska's Niobrara River Valley, currently the easternmost cougar nursery in the country north of Florida. It is 700 miles from the Niobrara to the closest prime cougar habitat John identified in the Arkansas/Missouri Ozarks.
In 25 years, Prairie recolonization has expanded 350 miles north to the North Dakota Badlands, and 200 + miles south to Nebraska's Wildcat Hills. But it has reclaimed just 150 miles east from the Black Hills to the Niobrara across prairie habitat that is both emptier and less hostile to dispersers than the agriculture/forest habitat across the Missouri River. How female dispersal will bridge this 700 mile-long shooting gallery, how females will raise litters to dispersal age where no male has survived, is going to take an advocacy ground-game working with and among the state wildlife agencies.
State Wildlife Action Plans
CRF has spent the last two years in New York and Vermont updating the 2015 State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAP) for wolves and cougars. SWAPs are the action piece of the federally mandated Teaming With Wildlife program established to identify species at-risk for becoming threatened/endangered, to keep them from further decline via the SWAP. Included are species extirpated from any given state. Part of the genius in the SWAP process relies on collaboration between the agencies and NGOs like Audobon, Izaak Walton, and 4H Clubs - NGOs who often have more experience with a certain species than the agency. With wolf and cougar researchers/advocates from the Northeast Wolf Coalition and CRF aboard, New York and Vermont wildlife officials invited us to revise their wolf and cougar assessments. And while New York decided not to include any of its extirpated species in the final SWAP list, Vermont did, the only Northeast state to develop action plans for the big predators.
As we've mentioned previously, Teaming With Wildlife is the federally administered wildlife program including 6,300 NGO partners focused on protecting non-consumptive, non-game species that so many wildlife advocates have called for. For two years we sat in sometimes contentious but for the most part congenial meetings face-to-face with agency reps, hunters, trappers and anglers, bird and butterfly watchers. And if Joe Racette, the NYS DEC biologist supervising the program appeared cautious initially with the big predator advocates in his mist, he proved to be a stalwart voice for our perspective. Joe performed his job as the finest of civil servants, and we're exceptionally pleased that New York recently made him its top biologist. In Vermont, Jon Kart and Chris Bernier welcomed us with open arms. Nothing in our 15 years as an NGO has provided us with the kind of access and opportunity to meaningfully represent Puma concolor at the state level as Teaming With Wildlife. Putting ourselves in position in every state east of the Prairie states to work on the 2025 round of action plans, paving the way state-by-state for cougar recolonization will be one of our major objectives over the next decade.
Here are a few others:
Partnering with Wildlands Network
If you're familiar with the conservation idea of connecting big chunks of habitat like national parks and wilderness areas with wildlife corridors across the mountain spines of the continent, chances are it came from the Wildlands Network (WN).
One of WN's founders, Dave Foreman - who coined the term rewilding - has long imagined the cougar as a focal species of an Eastern Wildway traversing the Appalachians. CRF director, John Davis, another WN founder, traced his TrekEast route promoting the Eastern Wildway from the Everglades to New Brunswick's Gaspe Peninsula as if her were a dispersing cougar. In conjunction with the Wildlands Network, mapping river corridors dispersing cougars are already using across the Midwest, mapping linkages along the Appalachian chain and targeting these wildlife corridors for protection is another piece of our recovery ground-game.
Wildlife Funding Reform
In 2014, the Cougar Rewilding Foundation presented a detailed analysis of the sportsmen skewed funding of wildlife in the United States. We called out the hypocrisy of the Outdoor Recreation Industry/Big Green NGO leaders who advocate for wildlife funding reform even as they refuse to directly fund wildlife or reform wildlife funding. We developed a proposal to reinvest a percentage of state revenues from wildlife watching, hunting and angling back into the resource. Two seasoned wildlife funding experts took a long look at our model and gave it a thumbs up. As we begin engaging states on their cougar SWAPs, we'll also be pitching our wildlife reinvestment proposal. With the Wildlands Network, we're beginning to explore with Outdoor Recreation Industry leaders what plans they might develop for wildlife funding. Then there's our biggest incipient project: working with conservation NGOs to create a wildlife investment bank whose profits will go directly to dedicated non-game programs like Teaming With Wildlife.
Carnivore Conservation Act
As we move deeper into the 21st century, both the research on the negative effects of sport hunting predators and the almost complete disregard by state game agencies to incorporate this research into predator management plans bring greater urgency to the need for a federal Carnivore Conservation Act. Similar to the Migratory Bird Act, coyote biologist Jon Way has produced a bill he is attempting to move through the Massachusetts state legislature. The disgraces of federal wolf delisting, the compromising of federal grizzly, lynx, and panther recovery plans, the failure to list wolverines as federally threatened/endangered, the open season, no bag-limit slaughter of eastern coyotes (in states where they're not classified varmints), the ungrounded proposals to raise cougar hunting quotas, and the unaccountability to anyone by the USDA's predator decimating Wildlife Services, make it clear it is high time to consider protecting all predators, all the time. One thing we now know: hunting predators is unnecessary for managing them. Trophy hunting predators is no longer justified as a game management tool. No state would dream of killing bald eagles or peregrine falcons the day they achieve recovery targets, but that's exactly what we're doing to recovering predators. Time to push for a national Carnvivore Conservation Act.
Reintroductions
We aren't advocates of cougar reintroductions because we want to be. Some in the conservation community believe if wolves had been allowed to naturally recolonize Yellowstone, the furor unleashed on reintroduced wolves in the Northern Rockies would never have occurred. But wolf recolonization in the Upper Great Lakes saw no such tempering upon delisting, just as cougar recolonization on the Prairies was met with equal ferocity as soon as there were deemed enough cats to hunt. Hunting appears to be the flashpoint. Predator demonization rachets up around hunting proposals, and tolerance for predators can further decline once a hunt is implemented.
One Adirondack study showed the public is more amenable to cougar recolonization than reintroduction; the panther reintroduction plan received wide support, even among hunters and anglers traditionally less supportive of predator recovery. Reintroductions are certainly controversial. But it is our seasoned opinion that cougars are not recolonizing the East Coast in this, or the next, or the next generation. Under ideal conditions, they are decades from recolonizing the Arkansas/Missouri Ozarks, let alone further east. Cougars face wolves in the Upper Great Lakes, wolves Prairie dispersers have never seen before, wolves that have been found impacting kitten survival dramatically in one of the few studies monitoring cougar/wolf dynamics. And there remains the caveat that a mature male in 25 years has yet to survive, yet to set up a home range anywhere in the Midwest east of Prairie habitat. Hundreds upon hundreds of confirmations do not equate to recovery. Midwest confirmations represent the headstones of a vast cougar graveyard. East Coast reintroductions are imperative if we want cougars back.
When we transitioned our East Coast cougar search in 2008 to advocating for East Coast cougar recovery, our very first move was to partner with the Center for Biological Diversity to jump-start the reintroduction mandate in the panther recovery plan. Panther habitat analyses, public attitude surveys showing broad public support for reintroductions, and successful cougar test releases had all been completed and essentially squandered in the Southeast. Let's stop watching the roadside panther death-toll rise every year (2015 set another record) from their last stand in the Big Cypress Swamp, and bring these wasted panther lives home to the Southeast. We'll continue seeking partners like the Center for Biological Diversity and the Wildlands Network while working on recovery research in the Greater Smokies, in the central Appalachians, and in the mighty Adirondacks to restore cougars to the East's mountain backbone, where eastern deciduous forests are dying without the cougar's deer-shepherding guardianship.
Contraction: Kill Fatigue
Even as we continue developing our cougar recovery ground-game, we'll be pulling back from some of our more conspicuous watchdogging: LTEs, Facebook editorializing, newsletter recovery proposals and analysis of cougar research, management and policy. Some of our contraction is simply the collateral damage from reporting daily on the hammering cougars have taken during the past five years - call it kill fatigue - some is the fogeying of the digitally challenged among us. But the face-to-face SWAP process reminded us that we don't need Instagram, SnapChat, or even Facebook to influence cougar recovery. To this end, we'll be dropping the name from and handing off the Cougar Rewilding Foundation Facebook page to our colleague, Helen McGinnis. No one takes the daily pulse of cougar nation more thoroughly than Helen, and her cougar Facebook page will be the richest, most accurate source for transpiring cougar news. This will leave our webpage as our primary public interface, which will see a remodeling in the New Year and a focus on building our digital library - most of the traffic to our website is generated by researching students. We'll continue to put out a short newsletter periodically keeping members posted on our recovery efforts, and our partnership with the Wildlands Network will likely find some of our tracks tracing through their media outlets.
With such a brimming agenda, the Cougar Rewilding Foundation isn't going anywhere, we just won't be as visible.
Heart of a Lion
Finally, it's not too early to promote a book that may well rewrite our national understanding of Puma concolor. Will Stolzenburg's Heart of a Lion, due out in April, 2016, chronicles the improbable odyssey of the Black Hills suitor who defied the Midwest gauntlet and then some before killed on a Connecticut highway in June of 2011. Part legacy demon hunt, part natural history mystery, part unrequited love story, Heart of a Lion keeps tragic adventure company with Sebastion Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. It is our supreme hope that Heart of a Lion's 2,000 mile-long, victimless trek into the belly of the Northeast's exurbs - with satellite California tales of legislated residential captures and bemused LA coexistence - dissolves the fantasy of urban cougar plagues predicted by books like Beast in the Garden.
Good New Year!
Christopher Spatz
Graphics courtesy of the Mountain Lion Foundation's Amy Rodrigues
Thank you to Adirondack artist Rod McGiver for the use of his Shadows image on our masthead.
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