Nature & Wildlife
Eastern cougars (Puma concolor couguar) were officially declared extinct last week, on January 22, 2018. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has now removed them from the Endangered Species list, where they had been placed in 1973.
Nature & Wildlife
It’s the day after New Year’s, and we’re just entering into 2018. In Times Square last night, according to the Associated Press, it was the second-coldest New Year’s celebration on record. The temperature was only 10 degrees Fahrenheit in New York City at midnight.
Nature & Wildlife
The largest wild cat in North America, the mountain lion—also known as a catamount, cougar, panther and puma—has powerful limbs and can leap as high as 15 feet and as far as 40 feet. That makes it an expert at attacking prey from behind. It also tends to make hikers in mountain lion territory wary.
Travel Tales
It was our first evening at EcoCamp Patagonia when we saw it—our first puma. Relaxing on a cool evening, a female puma lay at the bottom of a large hill directly below camp.
Nature & Wildlife
In Wisconsin where I live, we call three large predators “neighbors”: the black bear, the gray wolf and the occasional mountain lion. Because of this, you might think that Wisconsinites’ attitudes toward all three animals would be similar.
Conservation
Kudos to California. Last October, it became the first state to ban lead ammunition for all types of hunting. The ban will benefit the state’s namesake condors, which nearly went extinct. In 1982, only 22 California condors remained on the planet.
Videos
The cougar that lost his life recently on a highway in Connecticut pulled off one remarkable feat. He walked from South Dakota to the East Coast, a journey that probably encompassed 1,600 miles or more. And he did it mostly in secret, avoiding large cities.
