What am I sappy cat blogging?
November 22, 2013
Cougars are the topic – the four-legged variety.
Here is a map from the Cougar Network showing the expansion of cougars across the U.S.
The solid green areas depict established populations. The red and blue dots indicate sightings.
Long ago the Inca called them puma, but today — though they belong to only one species — they have many names. In Arizona they are known as mountain lions; in Florida they are panthers, and elsewhere in the South they are called painters. When they roamed New England, they were called catamounts. In much of the Midwest they are known as cougars, and that is the name everyone understands.
From Wikipedia:
An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in most American habitat types. It is the second heaviest cat in the Western Hemisphere, after the jaguar. Solitary by nature and nocturnal, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines and is nearer genetically to the domestic cat than true lions. [How about that?]
I consider this expansion a natural way to manage the deer population.
Gunsmoke and Knitting 
We are told to sing really loud and swing our arms when we walk in a local wilderness park because of cougars or mountain lions or jaguars…
That’s kind of scary.
That’s pretty cool. I will keep my eyes open and be the first to spot a cougar in the MetroParkCentralis range. Well, maybe the second person to spot one.
We can hope.