Eastern Puma Declared Extinct: What the 2018 Delisting Meant

Originally published 2019-05-05.

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In January 2018 the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) formally removed the eastern puma, also called the eastern cougar, from the federal list of endangered species, because it no longer existed. The decision did not mark a sudden loss. The last known eastern puma was killed in Maine in 1938, and after a review that began in 2011 the agency concluded the population had been gone since around the 1930s. Taking it off the list simply made official what biologists had suspected for decades.

This article explains what the eastern puma was, why it disappeared, what the delisting did and did not mean, and why some conservationists want cougars back in the eastern United States.

What was the eastern puma?

Pumas (Puma concolor), also known as cougars or mountain lions, are large, solitary cats. Adult males typically reach about 2.4 metres from nose to tail tip and weigh roughly 53 to 72 kg, while females are smaller. The species has the widest range of any wild land mammal in the Americas, stretching from Canada's Yukon to the southern Andes.

The "eastern puma" was the name given to the pumas of eastern North America. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, they once ranged from Quebec to South Carolina and from Manitoba to Illinois, through forests, mountains and swamps. A separate population, the Florida panther, survived in southern Florida.

The photograph above shows a puma from a western population, since no good photographs of a living eastern puma exist. Western and eastern animals looked essentially the same.

Why it disappeared

The decline began long before modern conservation. As European settlers cleared forests in the 1700s and 1800s, pumas lost both habitat and prey, because white-tailed deer were also heavily hunted. Pumas that took livestock were shot, trapped or poisoned. By the early twentieth century they had vanished from almost all of the East outside Florida.

Isolated reports continued. A puma was killed in New Brunswick in 1932 and another in Maine in 1938, the last eastern puma confirmed by a carcass. In the decades since, people have reported thousands of "sightings", but the FWS found no evidence of a breeding population north of Florida.

The long road to the 2018 decision

The eastern puma was placed on the federal endangered list in 1973, the same year Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, even though none had been confirmed for more than three decades. Listing it gave legal protection to any animals that might still exist and allowed for searches.

In 2011 the FWS completed a detailed review of records, research and reported sightings and concluded that the eastern puma was extinct. In 2015 it proposed removing it from the list, and on 22 January 2018 the decision became final. Animals that are extinct cannot be recovered, so keeping them listed served no legal purpose.

Some older reports describe the delisting as the moment the eastern puma "went extinct". That is a misunderstanding. The animal had been gone for around eighty years; 2018 was simply the paperwork catching up with reality.

Was it really a separate kind of puma?

Here the story gets more complicated. The FWS listing relied on an older classification from 1946 that divided North American pumas into many subspecies, including an eastern one. Genetic research since then has challenged that view. In 2017 the IUCN Cat Specialist Group recognised only two puma subspecies: one covering North and Central America and one in most of South America.

By that reckoning, the eastern puma was not a distinct subspecies but the eastern part of one continent-wide population. That does not change the fact that pumas were wiped out across the East. It does mean that the cats still living in the West, and in Florida, are genetically very close to the ones that were lost.

Pumas that still visit the East

Pumas from the West are slowly spreading. Breeding populations exist in the Black Hills of South Dakota and in parts of North Dakota and Nebraska, and young males sometimes travel enormous distances in search of territory. In June 2011 a puma was seen in Greenwich, Connecticut, and killed by a car in Milford the next day. DNA tests showed it had come from the Black Hills, a journey of at least 1,500 miles.

The Florida panther, meanwhile, shows what recovery can look like. By the 1970s only about 20 were left, and inbreeding caused health problems. In the mid-1990s eight pumas from Texas were released to add genetic diversity. Numbers have since grown to an estimated 200 to 230, though vehicle collisions remain the leading cause of death and the panther still occupies only about 5% of its historic range. Some older articles describe its numbers as falling every year; the overall trend since the 1990s has in fact been upward.

Should cougars return to the eastern US?

Many ecologists argue that the East is missing its top predators. Without pumas and wolves, white-tailed deer have become extremely abundant in many areas, browsing young trees and the ground cover that birds nest in. The FWS itself noted that parts of the Adirondacks, New England, the Great Lakes region and the Midwest could potentially support pumas.

A 2016 study estimated that if cougars recolonised parts of the Northeast, they could reduce deer numbers and cut deer-vehicle collisions by about 22% within 30 years, preventing thousands of injuries and around 155 human deaths. The Center for Biological Diversity has urged states, including New York, to reintroduce cougars from western populations, arguing that big carnivores keep "the wild food web healthy".

Reintroduction is not simple. Pumas need large connected areas, and public concern about safety and livestock is real, even though attacks on people are rare. For now, natural spread from the West seems a more likely route than a planned release.

What the eastern puma's story teaches

The eastern puma shows how long extinction can take to be recognised, and how much depends on the decisions people make decades earlier. It also offers some hope. The Florida panther's recovery and the slow eastward spread of western pumas show that large predators can recover when they are given space and protection.

If you live in the eastern United States and believe you have seen a puma, wildlife agencies generally ask for clear evidence such as photographs, tracks or trail-camera footage. Many reports turn out to be bobcats, dogs or house cats, but confirmed visitors from the West do occur.

Sources: Center for Biological Diversity, 22 January 2018; Wikipedia: Eastern cougar, Cougar, Florida panther. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.