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Such cougar dispersal "is what they're programmed to do. Young mammals, even young humans, tend to move away from home," said Paul Beier, a Northern Arizona University conservation biology professor who studies cougars. "They once occupied the midwestern U.S. There's still some appropriate habitat, and this is how they'll find it." Cougars are known to be largely secretive and mostly keep to riverbanks and wooded areas, usually avoiding humans while feeding on deer, turkeys and raccoons. But at times, the predators have drifted into populated areas. Police in Santa Monica, Calif., last month killed a 95-pound mountain lion that roamed into a downtown area
-- the first such sighting in that city in more than three decades -- and Chicago police in 2008 shot and killed a 150-pound cougar in an alley on the city's North Side. The study's findings come as little surprise to Bill Jorgenson, a North Dakotan who came face to face in January of last year with a 130-pound female cougar and her three cubs in a storage barn on his property, where he has 20 horses and some 1,000 head of cattle. Fearing for his safety, Jorgenson shot and killed the animals. "They're so thick out here, it's unbelievable," Jorgenson, 58, said of the mountain lions he blames for "wiping out" the deer population around his home near the 1,700-resident town of Watford City. "Two years ago, it'd be nothing to see 200 to 300 mule deer out there; this past winter, we never saw more than 20. We have carcasses all over where they've been killed." Missouri's Department of Conservation said recently the 14 confirmed cougar sightings in that state this year compares to a dozen cougars confirmed there over the previous 16 years. Since 1996, Missouri has deployed a specially trained, evidence-collecting "Mountain Lion Response Team" of wildlife experts, law enforcers and biologists whenever there's a credible sighting of cougars.
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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