DULUTH — A mountain lion spotted wandering through Duluth on Wednesday — prompting two schools to temporarily lock their doors and keep anyone from exiting — likely originated in Nebraska.
That’s according to John Erb, a furbearer and wolf research biologist at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, who said the agency has been receiving reports of this cougar in Minnesota since early September, when it was spotted near Fergus Falls.
“Then we got a flurry of pictures that kind of help us loosely track it,” Erb said.
Trail and security cameras captured it near Park Rapids, Wadena, Brainerd, Nisswa, Pine River, Leech Lake, Grand Rapids, Tower and finally the North Shore.
Bre Bujold saw it on Friday outside her home near McQuade Road northeast of Duluth. Bujold recorded an approximately 45-second video of it and shared it on Facebook, where it quickly spread.
“It was really cool,” Bujold said, adding that as long as people don’t bother the cougar, it won’t bother them.
How does Erb know it’s the same cat? For one, it’s easily identifiable thanks to its ear tags and a radio collar that has stopped working. But Erb said the DNR is “99% certain it came from Nebraska as part of a study.”
A Nebraska biologist involved in that project was confident, after reviewing some of the photos of the cat, that it was a 2-year-old male they had collared.
“They tend to be the young males that take off from the established populations and start wandering, looking for a new home,” Erb said.
Before reaching Minnesota, the cougar was seen passing through Iowa, South Dakota and, in late August, North Dakota.
Then, on Wednesday, it made its presence in Duluth known in a big way.
A sighting of the collared cougar in eastern Duluth prompted two schools to enter a “secure status” Wednesday afternoon.
Duluth Public Schools spokesperson Adelle Wellens said Ordean East Middle School and the nearby Congdon Park Elementary School kept anyone from going outside at 1:36 p.m. after the Duluth Police Department alerted the district to the cougar sighting about a half mile from Ordean.
Congdon’s secure status was lifted at 2 p.m. and Ordean’s was lifted shortly after, Wellens said.
“We’re confident that it has moved on,” Wellens said.
The Duluth Police Department urged the public not to approach wild animals.
“The Duluth Police Department has been made aware of sightings of a mountain lion/cougar in Duluth,” police said in a news release. “We have been in communication with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and they are also aware of the animal. At this time, there is no further action that law enforcement will be taking.”
While the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said there is “no evidence to suggest the possibility of a resident breeding population of cougars in Minnesota,” mountain lions, also called cougars or pumas, are infrequent visitors to the Northland. But every year, reports of sightings are made, some of which are confirmed.
A wildlife photographer in 2020 captured images of a cougar in Lake County. In 2011 a cougar that had roamed the Northland two years earlier was found struck and killed on a Connecticut highway — more than 1,000 miles away. In 2009 and 2010, the cat was seen in Champlin, a northern suburb of Hennepin County. It was later confirmed — by DNA analysis of its scat from all three locations — near Eau Claire, Wis. and later near Cable in Bayfield County, Wis.
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