Introduction

Lord of the Forest

Cougars, Cougars Everywhere

From 'Endangered' to 'Limbo'

Great Escapes: The Abitibi Cougar

Do Cougars Eat People?

Curiosity About the Cat

What do you Think?

A lack of information has recently pushed the eastern cougar off the official endangered species list. In April, scientists and others affiliated with the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) voted to reassign the animal from "endangered" status, with all the cachet and protection the word implies, to "indeterminate."

The new label is the scientific equivalent of a great big shrug.

"Some people would look at that as a cop-out. It isn't, really," says Fred Scott, who is now part-time curator of the Wildlife Museum at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. His report on the eastern cougar provided the scientific support for the reassignment. Accepted by COSEWIC just days ago, his report will soon be available to the public.

Scott's interest in the eastern cougar goes back to the late 1970s, when there was a dramatic increase in the number of sightings reported to the museum. He recorded and in some cases followed up those sightings, believing strongly that at least a few of them were the real thing.

While he does not believe any cougars of the original eastern stock remain in the Maritimes, he thinks it is possible that escapes and descendents of escapes are roaming the woods.

"I think there is strong circumstantial evidence in the reports of cubs being seen with adults, or cubs by themselves," Scott says. "There probably are some places at some times where these escaped captive populations manage to breed at least for a few years at a time."

Scott spent 150 hours over several months checking the computer database at the Museum against the original reports, and organizing the data to filter out questionable reports. Of 450 cougar reports in Nova Scotia between 1978 and 1996, only 150 are considered "possible" sightings. A tiny fraction (15) are ranked "probable." The 1985 Shelburne County vehicle collision is the only "virtually certain" sighting.

In any given year there are "hot spots," clusters of sightings that persist for a few years while large patches of the province are devoid of sightings.

"Which indicates that they're either moving around a lot or that a population may be established for a few years in one place and then die out and not be replaced for a long time," Scott says.

He hastens to add, however, that his maps plot not only credible sightings, but questionable ones as well. Credible sightings alone do not provide enough data to discern any trends at all.

Which wouldn't wash with a scientific body such as COSEWIC. For the term "endangered" to be taken seriously, it must rest on hard science. There is too much doubt regarding the eastern cougar to give it that label, Scott concludes.

That same doubt, however, saved the eastern cougar from being labelled "extirpated." While Scott believes the original eastern cougar stock has been completely eliminated east of Ontario, there is a high probability it has survived uninterrupted to the present day in Manitoba and extreme western Ontario.

"Initially, in the first draft of the report that I submitted, I wanted to split the recommended status," Scott says. "I wanted to say 'endangered' in western Ontario ... and 'extirpated' everywhere else in eastern Canada."

COSEWIC, however, insisted on a single status for the entire country. When COSEWIC members voted in April, they were split between "endangered" and "extirpated." Unable to agree, they unanimously accepted "indeterminate."

(Other mammals of indeterminate status include the harbor porpoise and dwarf sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean, and the western harvest mouse on the Prairies. No eastern mammal other than the cougar is listed as indeterminate.)

Twinned with the dearth of physical evidence is the question of whether there every was such a thing as an eastern cougar. The subspecies was identified by biologists only many years after eastern-dwelling cougars had been wiped out. As it turns out, those biologists were asleep at the switch.

"The setting up of the eastern cougar as a subspecies was bad taxonomy," says Scott. "The original authors did it very sloppily and their diagnosis wouldn't be accepted by today's standards."

Today's cutting-edge species classification work is being done by people such as Melanie Culver, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland. Using new comparison techniques at the molecular genetic level, Culver has studied the similarities among panthers, cougars and pumas throughout their ranges in North, Central and South America.

DNA analysis has muddied the waters for classification in that there can be as much genetic variability between individuals of a single species as there is between species. In other words, it's hard to tell where one species (or in this case subspecies) ends and another begins.

As a result of Culver's work, the whole decades-old system of cougar classification has had to be dispensed with. Based on a limited number of museum specimens that provided DNA for sampling, she found no concrete evidence the eastern cougar was significantly different from other North American cougars.

The bottom line is that if eastern-dwelling cougars were never genetically distinct, COSEWIC could hardly call the eastern cougar an endangered species.

No wildlife biologist who spoke with Outdoor Nova Scotia believes any of the original eastern stock is still with us today, distinct or not. Yet most agree there are probably cougars here. So where are they coming from?

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