Which LauraPrughsaid could be pretty scary. "And they will be moving within the backyards of a lot people."
MOUNTAIN LION IN CT HOW TO
"This lion would have to learn how to cross highways - how to move around and about," Ortega said. Ortega said Connecticut could potentially support mountain lions, but forest fragmentation means only a handful could live here at any one time - and they'd have to adapt. Places where there are more continuous, and remote, forest landscapes. "I could probably see it a little bit more in Maine, for example." "Will it really work? It's very difficult for me to see it here in Connecticut," Ortega said. "As idea it's great," said MortyOrtega, a wildlife ecologist atUConn. In other words, Prugh's team found cougars coming back to the region could actually save lives. "Because they reduce deer density by 22 percent, then we projected that they would also decrease deer-vehicle collision rates by 22 percent," Prugh said. and estimated that, over a 30-year period, cougars would reduce Eastern deer densities by 22 percent. Writing in the journal Conservation Letters, her team paired that up with cougar predation information from the Western U.S. To find out how, Prugh took lots of deer data, looking at birth rates, population density charts, and car impacts. In 2011, a cougar was hit by a car on a highway in Milford, Connecticut, and genetic testing revealed that cougar came all the way from South Dakota. Prughand her colleagues believe that and other sightings in the Midwestern states raise the future possibility of a permanent population of Eastern cougars, which could impact deer populations. Wildlife officials believe this cougar may be the one that migrated over 1,000 miles before being struck by a car on a Connecticut highway. Photograph of cougar captured on a trail camera on Januin Clark County, Wisconsin. But those cats appear to be wandering farther from home. Today, the only populations that can live and breed on their own are Western cougars and Florida panthers. Fish and Wildlife Service says Eastern cougars are extinct. Right now, all the major wildlife agencies say cougars are not here. She estimates those car accidents are enough to cost Americans more than $1.5 billion in damages, which made her curious "to explore what would happen if cougars did return to the Eastern U.S.," she said.
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"We were driving to swim practice early in the morning and I was trying to sleep a little in the back seat and the driver hit a deer," she said.Įveryone in the car was fine, but Prugh said each yearabout 200 people die in 1.2 million crashes with deer across the U.S. "Everyone’s been in a car wreck with a deer out East - or knows someone who has," said Prugh, who was involved in a crash as a teenage passenger in a car in Maryland. Those collisions can lead to costly insurance claims, injuries, and deaths - which made scientists wonder what would happen to deer, and to us, if an elusive carnivore came back to the northeast: the mountain lion.īut LauraPrugh, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Washington said that to humans, deer are statistically the most dangerous wild mammal in North America. Each year, thousands of deer are killed on Connecticut roads and highways.