Are mountain lions on their way to Pennsylvania? – PennLive.com

Are mountain lions on their way to Pennsylvania?(National Park Service)
As the latest hoaxed photo of a mountain lion supposedly killed in Pennsylvania died a slow death on Facebook yesterday, the head of an organization tracking the eastern movements of the big cats was preparing a presentation for a Pennsylvania audience tonight.
Michelle LaRue, executive director of the Cougar Network and a research ecologist at the University of Minnesota, will discuss the eastern expansion of cougars from their core range in the western U.S. at 7 p.m. in Moravian College's Haupert Union Building, Bethlehem.
The Cougar Network, working with state agencies, have documented multiple mountain lions as far east as Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan in recent years, as well as one cat killed on a highway in Milford, Connecticut, in June 2011.
Those cats for which DNA evidence was recovered had come east from South Dakota, part of the known, modern-day, U.S. mountain lion range.
They are generally believed to be young cats roaming in search of new breeding territories to claim as their own.
Although there was no evidence that the 2011 mountain lion ever set foot in Pennsylvania, DNA evidence confirmed that it had been both west and east of the state. It was recorded in Minnesota and Wisconsin in late 2009 and early 2010, and then died in Connecticut in 2011. With the Great Lakes in its way, the cat moved either north or south of the water, and the latter route would have seen it pass through at least some of Pennsylvania.
While there have been no confirmed occurrences of mountain lions in Pennsylvania since the late 1800s, dozens of sincere reports of sightings and tracks and even more hoaxed reports emerge across the state each year.
Reports generally go uninvestigated by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, which discounts them as mistaken identities, illegal pets escaped or released and outright fabrications.
Many of those claiming to have encountered a cougar in Pennsylvania take that non-confirmation by the commission as an attack on their veracity and character.
They regularly join the camp of those angrily claiming the commission has introduced the big cats back into Pennsylvania as a control measure against the state's huge deer population. No evidence has ever been produced to support those charges.
(PennLive has investigated many reports of mountain lions, and other mystery creatures, and has found no confirming evidence. However, if you've seen a mountain lion, or other mystery creature, or evidence of either, in Pennsylvania, contact outdoor writer Marcus Schneck at mschneck@pennlive.com.)
Mountain lions were once widespread across North America, but their range shrunk dramatically as they were pursued through unregulated hunting and by farmers aiming to protect their livestock, and moved off the landscape by habitat fragmentation.
According to the commission, the last Pennsylvania mountain lion was killed in the late 1800s. The northeastern U.S. population is thought to have disappeared in the 1930s.
The last native mountain lion known to be killed in Pennsylvania is on display in the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg, displays a taxidermy mount of a mountain lion in glass case, with the notation, "This lion, found near Hawk Mountain in Berks County around 1871, is the last native mountain lion known to have been shot in Pennsylvania."
More about mountain lions in Pennsylvania:
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