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• "For those who are excited about the notion of living with large carnivores, this is great," Nielsen added. "For those worried about livestock degradations, there's going to be division in the ranks in the Midwest. It's going to be interesting to see how the public responds if this colonizing continues."
• In the study, researchers relied on carcasses, cougar DNA from scat and hair samples, animal tracks, photos, video and instances of attacks on livestock across 14 states and Canadian provinces to measure the number of cougars east of the Rocky Mountains.
• Scientists long had suspected that cougars were migrating from the West or South Dakota's Black Hills mountain range, where populations of the big, long-tailed cats have been so abundant that the state has staged a yearly hunting season targeting mountain lions since 2005. The study excluded confirmations from the Black

Hills, given that state's bounty of the cats.
• Of the cougar confirmations by researchers, roughly 62 percent took place within some 12 miles of habitat considered suitable for the animals' populations. Sixty-seven of the confirmations were in Nebraska, 31 in North Dakota, 12 each in Oklahoma and Texas, 11 in South Dakota and 10 in Missouri. Single-digit tallies were in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas and Michigan.

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