COUGARS RETURN TO A CHANGED IOWA: ABUNDANT PREY LURES BIG CATS    

As many as a dozen mountain lions may be living in Iowa, state officials estimate.

Kate Thompson, Globe correspondent

03/31/2002

The Boston Globe

THIRD      

A.12

(Copyright 2002)

DES MOINES - Mountain lions hadn't been seen in Iowa for more than a century when James Dinsmore wrote in 1993 that they probably would never wander back into the state.

He admits he was wrong.

In August, a woman driving through the rolling, forested hills of west-central Iowa struck and killed a 135-pound cat near the town of Harlan. Since then, there have been 21 reports of tracks and sightings, mostly in the western part of the state. Authorities have confirmed several.

Wolves and black bears are also returning, as they have been in populated areas in several other Midwestern and Western states. Their reappearance in Iowa is noteworthy because they are apparently adapting to a far different environment from the one their ancestors knew in the 1860s, and it suggests that predatory animals could return to other areas where they would not have been expected to survive.

The landscape of Iowa has changed considerably since the state joined the union 157 years ago. Less than 1 percent of the land is held in trust for public use, and very little has been kept in its original state.

Iowa's rich, black soil drew farmers who spread from one end of the state to the other in the mid-1800s. The influx displaced Native Americans, and settlers trapped animals for their skins or hunted them for food, in many cases eradicating a species.

When mountain lions began showing up last year, there were cornfields, cities, and confined livestock instead of tall-grass prairies, lush wetlands, and forests full of prey.

The big cats, bears, and wolves would have an easier time in Maine, Minnesota, or Wyoming, where the land hasn't been altered as much, said Dinsmore, an animal ecology professor at Iowa State University in Ames.

"For them to come back here and show signs that they may be going to make it here, to me, that is pretty unusual," he said.

Mountain lions, sometimes called cougars, range in size from 120 to 200 pounds and can easily travel 60 miles in one night.

Ron Andrews, a game specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, estimates there may be as many as a dozen of the big cats living in the state. Some may have been domesticated and released, but others have climbed mountains, forded rivers, and stalked through forests and fields to find new homes.

Some Iowans say they're terrified to let their children play outdoors, while others contend that a mountain lion is as afraid of humans as they are of it. A few are actively looking for cougars, including James Mahaffy, a zoology teacher at Dordt College in Sioux Center. He hasn't spotted one in the wild.

Several factors may be attracting large predators to the state, but food is the key. It's abundant. At the turn of the century, there were only about 200 deer, all in a captive herd in the southwest corner. Today, there are thousands of deer in every corner of the state, as part of a repopulation effort that has been so successful that they are often regarded as pests.

Mountain lions also have a stable population in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a distance of about 400 miles, across the Missouri River.

"We believe they have come close to reaching the saturation point, and they are looking for new areas," said George Vandel, assistant director of the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish, and Wildlife."

Changes in population density also have made Iowa more at tractive to mountain lions, who tend to avoid humans and are nocturnal. While the amount of farmland hasn't changed, the size of farms has grown dramatically, leading to a decline in the number of families living in rural areas. A square mile of land once supported up to eight families, each with four or more children. Today, that same land would have two families, each with probably no more than two children.

"Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri are also all reporting increased sightings," Andrews said. "Some are legitimate. . . . There are many more sightings in the last three years."

Andrews said the federal Conservation Reserve Program has helped the state to increase habitat, creating a base for smaller mammals. That, too, may be part of the reason for the increasing diversity of Iowa's wildlife.

"But the adaptability of the animal is still number one," he said.

Cougars aren't protected under Iowa law, something the Department of Natural Resources proposed to change this year, but the effort became politicized.

"There are some people who are 100 percent on the animal's side and a number who are against them," Andrews said. "We would like to do things so we are in the middle, giving the animals some sort of protected status yet with the ability to kill them when they pose a threat. But sometimes good wildlife management falls apart in the political arena."

After passing in the Iowa Senate on a 38-6 vote early in March, the bill to protect mountain lions and black bears died in a House committee. Department officials may try again next year.

"The fact that species like mountain lions, bears, and wolves can show up here is pretty significant," Dinsmore said. "If these species can come back into Iowa and find a way to survive here, they ought to be able to survive almost anyplace in North America."

Caption: 1. As many as a dozen mountain lions may be living in Iowa, state officials estimate.