Trail Camera Captures Cougars in Minnesota

A video camera installed by the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project captured movements of a female cougar and three kittens. The discovery marks the first time in more than 100 years that evidence of cougars reproducing in Minnesota.

The high-quality video captured by the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project (youtu.be/7EL1FRB11DU).shows the kittens up close and feeding south of Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota. The Voyageurs Wolf Project has deployed hundreds of trail cameras in northeast Minnesota to help with wolf research. Those cameras have recorded footage of lone cougars eight times since 2023, but none of those cameras had recorded footage of kittens. The videos of the cougar with kittens were captured by two cameras that researchers placed over a GPS-collared deer they suspected a cougar might have killed.

Cougars were native to Minnesota before becoming locally extinct. There hasn’t been evidence of reproduction for more than 100 years in the eastern Midwest (east of the Dakotas and Nebraska) until recent reports from Michigan and now Minnesota. However, detections of individual adult cougars, most commonly wandering males, are now unsurprising across Minnesota and the western two thirds of the Midwest. Cougars can travel more than 40 miles in a day, and, to date, cougars documented in Minnesota appear to have all been transient animals from western South Dakota, North Dakota, or Nebraska. 

“Although this is an important starting point for potential population establishment in Minnesota, predicting the future is extremely difficult,” Erb said. “These kittens might not survive, potentially getting killed by wolves, a male cougar or vehicles. They may also become part of the founding catalyst for a slow but steady increase in numbers. Time will tell, but we are clearly nearing a point where the probability of a self-sustaining population has increased.”

Suggestions of what to do if a person encounters a cougar are available on the Minnesota DNR website (mndnr.gov/cougar).

Cougars are protected in Minnesota, with no open harvest season. Public safety officials can lethally take a cougar if it is determined to be an immediate threat to public safety.

More information about cougars in Minnesota can be found on the Minnesota DNRwebsite (mndnr.gov/cougar). More information about the Voyageurs Wolf Project is available at the project website (voyageurswolfproject.org).

Funding for the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.