Facts about Eastern Cougar
- 09
Solitary hunters, eastern cougars required territories ranging from 50 to 150 square miles per individual to sustain themselves on deer and smaller game throughout their woodland habitats.
- 08
Females of this now-extinct subspecies typically gave birth to one to three kittens per litter after a gestation period of approximately 92 days, similar to modern western mountain lions.
- 07
Sightings of eastern cougars in the eastern United States increased dramatically during the 1990s and 2000s despite the species being officially extinct, leading wildlife biologists to debate whether the animals were misidentified deer or escaped captive cougars.
- 06
Eastern cougars historically inhabited dense forests and swamps across a territory spanning approximately 900,000 square miles before habitat loss and hunting fragmented their range.
- 05
Genetic analysis of museum specimens from eastern cougars revealed they were a distinct subspecies from western mountain lions, classified as Puma concolor cougar before extinction.
- 04
Colonists and early settlers called eastern cougars by over a dozen regional names including painter, panther, catamount, and puma depending on their geographic location.
- 03
Adult male eastern cougars weighed between 140 and 180 pounds, making them significantly smaller than their western mountain lion counterparts which averaged 180 to 220 pounds.
- 02
In 1938, a hunter in Maine shot what was believed to be the last eastern cougar, a large cat that historically roamed from Quebec to South Carolina across eastern North America.
- 01
The eastern cougar was officially declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2011 after no confirmed sightings since the 1930s.