Sports Desk | December 23, 2001, Sunday OUTDOORS; A Scientific Search for Cougars By Bob Butz (NYT) 1073 words Late Edition – Final , Section 8 , Page 10 , Column 1

The New York Times December 23, 2001

On a Scientific Hunt for Michigan Cougars

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich.

ildlife officials have maintained that cougars have been extinct in Michigan for almost a century, but Dr. Patrick Rusz, without benefit of traps, a tranquilizer gun or a pack of yowling hounds, recently brought back evidence to the contrary.

     Schooled as a habitat biologist, Rusz serves as director of wildlife programs at the Michigan Wildlife Habitat Foundation. The foundation recently released his 64-page study, "The Cougar in Michigan: Sightings and Related Information," which outlined decades' worth of physical evidence, including sightings, plaster casts of tracks and even video footage. Still, it took Rusz, two college assistants and a handful of volunteers equipped with good hiking boots and a couple of boxes of resealable plastic bags to get the scientific proof.

     The bags Rusz and his team brought home were filled with scat that DNA tests confirmed as coming from a cougar. Rusz located the evidence (along with numerous tracks and the remains of some deer that he suspects cougars killed) in two areas of the Upper Peninsula: along a 33- mile section of Lake Michigan shoreline near Seul Choix Point and in the deep woods north of Baraga, 100 miles away, closer to Lake Superior.

     "I believe these cougars are what remains of a population that was never completely wiped out," Rusz said. "They are neither transients from the West or Canada nor released pets, but rather a small breeding population."      Florida is the only state east of the Mississippi known to harbor a breeding population of wild cougars. Elsewhere in the East, and specifically in heavily forested states like Pennsylvania and New York, efforts have yet to yield scientific evidence of cougars. Organizations have so far been relying on sightings and tracks that critics easily shrug off. Given the irrefutable results of fecal genetic analysis, a process refined only in the last decade, others might soon be taking Rusz's lead.

     As for Rusz, he is prepared to begin a new search in Michigan's more densely populated Lower Peninsula.

     "Until recently, all we had in the Lower Peninsula were tracks and sightings," he said in an interview.

     Rusz presented still photos taken from a video given to him by a woman in Mesick, about 20 miles south of Traverse City and about halfway up the Lake Michigan coastline from the Indiana border. The photos are grainy, but the animal in the pictures, with its tawny hide and long tail, is clearly a cougar skulking through the maples in deep snow.

     "Some Michigan Department of Natural Resources employees told her this was a house cat," Rusz said. He traveled to the site where the video was shot, and after comparing the photos and taking measurements of specific trees the cougar passed in the footage, determined the cat in the picture was close to 30 inches at the shoulder: clearly no barnyard kitty.

     Dale Willey of Tower, roughly an hour's drive northeast of Traverse City, reported a young colt in his pasture killed by a cougar. He said he saw the cougar July 3 and later found signs of how the cat, after killing the 50-pound colt, had cleared a five-foot fence and dragged its prey into some nearby bushes to feed.

     In cooperation with Rusz, Willey bulldozed a half-mile-long road along the edge of his property and checked it every other day for tracks. He found some on the 14th day, and Rusz later identified them as a cougar's.

     "Reliable sightings have come in from the Fife Lake area in Wexford and Kalkaska County, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and other spots around Traverse City," Rusz said. The next step is to expand his study to include these areas and find the cougar scat necessary to back up his beliefs.

     The big question is when will somebody capture a cougar? For many who dismiss Rusz's work, a genuine cougar is the only thing that will sway them.

     "But even those people won't be convinced," Rusz said.

     The latest naysayers contend that any cougars in the Michigan woods are probably released pets. A 1987 law, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act, prohibits private ownership of cougars. A Department of Natural Resources roster shows the names of roughly 20 people owning cougars grandfathered under the 1987 law, but most of these animals are dead and the rest in the waning years of old age. Further, preliminary DNA analysis of the scat samples Rusz found in the Upper Peninsula did not show any of the South American genotypes typically found in cougars kept as pets.

     "It's really not hard to imagine cougars surviving up here," Rusz said. "You have to look at what the landscape was like 100 years ago, when killing a cougar was worth a sizable bounty. A century ago, hunters stayed away from areas that would have been hard to rout cougars from for simple economic reasons. In the dense swamps and outlying areas, the output of effort required to kill a cougar was just too much, and here is where cougars were able to hold on."

     Rusz also believes that, like Florida's panthers, Michigan's cougars are probably suffering from decades of inbreeding. Although he thinks collaring a cougar is unnecessary, Rusz believes that somebody soon will. "Fecal analysis is cheap and can tell you almost as much as running a cat up a tree," he said. "Since cougars rarely stray from their established home range, unless the cat is a transient male, all collaring a cougar would show is it moving around its territory. With further fecal analysis we can determine the sex of a cougar, even whether or not there are troubles with inbreeding."

     If cougars do exist in Michigan, they are protected by the Endangered Species Act and cannot be hunted, trapped or harassed. Capturing a cougar is not part of Rusz's immediate plan, but he is applying for an official scientific collector's permit. Since the results of his study were released, Rusz has secured scat samples in the more densely populated Lower Peninsula and is awaiting test results that could show that cougars are closer than anyone ever imagined.