After reading all of the post about Cougars I have decided to add one more. On a June morning in 2002 My son, my grandson who was just seven at the time and I were picking up jugs on the Kaskaskia river that we had left out over night. The river was up several feet and there was more current than normal, some of our jugs had floated from just below Baldwin to Evansville. We saw a jug bouncing around under the Evansville bridge on the northwest side of the river, it had a nice size catfish on it and while taking the fish off I looked towards the bank and walking across the concrete apron under the bridge was a Cougar with something in it's mouth. I pointed it out to my son and grandson.
My son made a squalling sound with his mouth to get its attention, the Cougar turned and faced us and released what it was carrying in it's mouth, it just sat down and watched us for a couple of minutes. We saw that what it had in it's mouth was a very young kitten and the kitten began to crawl a few feet away from the Cougar. The Cougar turned away from us and picked up the kitten and walked across the concrete apron and into the woods.

Now I am not saying that this was a wild animal, only reporting what I saw. I think it was a young female and she was moving her kitten because either the river had come up or because a farmer was working in a field close by.
It would be very unusual for a wild female to leave it's core area and follow the river system to southern Illinois. I have only heard of young males doing that. While I have seen several Bob cats over the years this is the only Cougar I have ever seen in the wild. I would guess this animal to weight about 70 or 80lbs, it looked a bit on the thin side to me, it's tail was 25 to 28 inches in length. No camera, no picture, just another unconfirmed Cougar sighting.

There you go, proof that we have a breeding population pretty much everywhere...It's not that they are coming from elsewhere. The Cougars never left in the first place. As the deer herd increases so does the predator numbers. :) Anyway, I've been seeing them since I was 7 and that was 48 years ago...:)

Bigfoot, I lived in the Missouri Ozarks about 24 years ago and there were unconfirmed reports about Cougars every once in a while, of course the Missouri conservation always said no there were no big cats in the state. A rumor started circulating that a couple of local coon hunters were bragging about shooting a Cougar out of a tree that there dogs had treed and they had pictures to prove it. They were questioned by the local cpo but they said no it did not happen, but a few months later a Cougar hide was found in the area. The cpo paid another visit to the coon hunters and they fessed up and gave the cpo a picture of the cat laying on the tailgate of one of there pickup trucks.

My hunting buddy is the president of the St.Louis Long Beards chapter of the NWTF, he guides and calls for one of the biggest outfitters in Missouri, he tells about watching a video the outfitters has of a Cougar feeding on turkey remains that are put out for coyotes. Some times the hunters only cut out the breast and the rest of the turkey is placed in a pile in a field to attract coyotes, when a coyote comes to the turkey remains it is shot and the kill shot is recorded and shown to there clients. Cougars have been in Missouri for a long time and will expand there range as long as there are plenty of deer to feed on.