As we are learning, or perhaps you learned long ago, the story of the environment and man, and the idea of an ideal state of nature influenced or uninfluenced by man, is a bit of a complicated question…. there is not only science involved here but philosophy.. this is a short entry however, so I will try to cut to the chase..
The Cougar is introducing it’s self, or reintroducing it’s self, to Alaska..
Whether to chalk this up to Hope or Fear is a matter of question, but I’m going to toss it in the Hope category.
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=26
Reason why it might belong in fear: Global warming might be making previously inhospitable territory hospitable, but I kind of don’t buy that in this situation because the lands of South East Alaska, where they are most likely to live, haven’t changed that much.. what a solid land it is… amongst the most beautiful places in the world I might add.. to see the Lynn Canal or perhaps gaze across Frederick Sound from Mitkoff Island with whales breaching is to behold something special.
Now we could get complex and say that perhaps they were out competed by other species, the Lynx and the Wolf, the Bears and the Wolverines, but these species all co-habitate with it all over Canada, or did,and I think they all got along fine with plenty to eat most of the time. It’s a tricky matter to place the blame on indigenous groups, as we tend to assume, and there are kind of post enlightenment arguments perhaps in the first place, although some natives might argue otherwise, that most of the damage in the world was done, if you can call it damage, by Europeans in the post Colombian onslaught of global markets and the unification of all the global techniques for surviving and thriving that has been occurring since 1492.. complex indeed, and made more complex by the book 1491 by Charles Mann, that does inform the reader, if they had made assumptions otherwise, just how complex some Pre-Colombian cultures were, and how extensive their impact on the land might have been. I have some knowledge of the Tlingit and Heida Cultures, and they were a pretty impressive bunch before we showed up, yeah, the totem pole guys, and as much as some of the interior tribes of the great northern areas like the Athabaskans might not have been too culturally complex or tough on the land, there is a chance that the Tlingit or Heida could have gotten together and gotten rid of a bunch of Mountain Lions… anyhow, all speculation, and since the age of the rifle up there, who knows, but I figured I would toss this one in the hope category.. why not… mountain lions are cool…or, to be coldly scientific about my feelings towards felines, as this post kind of suggests, maybe I just have toxoplamosis..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
Like you didn’t have enough to worry about in the wilds of Alaska, enjoy this too.. I can’t wait to bump into one..`
Addendum September 2014:
20 months after writing this, I had the occasion to talk to a pair of Canadian Conservation officers whose territory appeared to be North West British Colombia. They are basically national game wardens, and they were working the areas along the Cassiar Highway, Rt. 37, that runs behind the Alaska Panhandle to the east. The Coastal Range that backs up to towns like Juneau and Wrangell is an uninterrupted wilderness that the Cassiar, usually only 20 feet wide and barely habituated, a town or settlement every 50 miles perhaps, hardly separates from the wilds to the north and east. I asked these guys about Mountain Lions, which they casually referred to as ‘Cats’ in response, a reference so casual I could tell they were bumping into them. They told me they just had their first issues in Whitehorse, Yukon, which would definitely have been thought of as way too far north, way too cold normally (Whitehorse can get stuck at 50 below F, it’s the Canadian equivalent of Fairbanks culturally and geographically) and that sightings around the Cassiar were becoming regular. The confirms the move. I did speculate to myself after meeting them, the possibility that instead of man displacing them, perhaps wolves might have, when logging both in the Alaska Panhandle and in this adjoining area of Canada was much more intense. It was banned under the Clinton Administration in the 90’s in the Alaska Panhandle, a sweetheart deal for the cruise ship industry which did hurt some local economies, but has benefited tourism perhaps more than compensatarily. Maybe the logging back then led to prey scarcity that had Wolves eliminating competition. I also saw two coyotes in the same area in this visit, also perhaps new territory for them. Their short legs distinguish them from Wolves. Both areas are recovering from all the logging as the Puma’s enter…
