Chris Bolgiano

As with any book looking at modern life in Appalachia, there is much in Bolgiano's book that is discouraging and somewhat less that is encouraging. She provides insights into some non-commonly heard of ways of earning (or eking out) a living in the mountains: horse logging, raising ginseng, etc. All in all, a good read. But at this point, the information is over 20 years old. I wonder how much has changed, how many of the book's subjects are still in business, how much more damage has been done by coal companies.… (altro)

Paradoxically, a not-very-well-written book with a lot of useful information. The authors – well, more accurately the editors – are a freelance writer on environmental topics (Chris Bolgiano) and a film critic (Jerry Roberts). Their principal contribution is a twenty-page introduction documenting the history of the “eastern” cougar, Puma concolor couguar (it’s spelled “couguar” in the subspecies name); even then, most of this is quotations from various early writers, including John James Audubon. The rest of the book is a collection of articles culled from various natural history publications and letters to and from government agencies. You have to sift through a lot to form any sort of coherent picture.


Not in the order presented in the book but my attempt to summarize things:


* The original cougar population in the western hemisphere extended from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego (the name “cougar” derives from Brazilian natives).


* Early European settlers thought cougars were true lions – apparently, they only saw pelts brought in by Native Americans and thought they were all lionesses. To be fair, the average European circa 1600 or so probably had never seen a real lion.


* The “eastern” population, except Florida, was mostly extirpated by the 1850s. A few cougars were killed in Eastern states as late as the 1930s.


* The actual number of specimens of “eastern” cougars is surprisingly small – less than two dozen, as taxidermied mounts, skeletons, or just skulls. The original description of the “eastern” subspecies was based on skull morphology. One of the specimens is the “Nittany Lion” mascot of Penn State, killed there in 1859.


* Starting in the 1990s, reports of “eastern” cougars became increasingly frequent. These included visual sightings, tracks, scats, still photographs, videos, and actual specimens – usually roadkill, railroad kill, or hunter kill, with a few captured animals. Evidence of one sort or another came from just about everywhere in the east, including New Brunswick, Massachusetts, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The visual only sightings are pretty suspect – a large number of them (over 100) are of “black” cougars. There’s no particular biological reason why melanistic color phases couldn’t exist; they’re well documented in other big cats. However, no melanistic cougar specimen has ever made it to a museum, despite centuries of legal hunting. Without going into potentially libelous detail, Bolgiano and Roberts note that the question of existence of eastern cougars has attracted conspiracy theorists.


* Eastern cougar skeptics – usually wildlife biologists – dismiss the evidence, citing feral pets as the most likely source for physical evidence. Photographic evidence is similarly disregarded, with the claim that supposed photographs or videos of eastern cougars were actually taken in the western US or Canada. (This appears to be actually true for at least some of the pictures of hunters posing with cougars). Other than Melanie Culver (see below) none of the wildlife experts cited by Bolgiano and Roberts has any comment at all on the subspecies question.


* The official position of the USFWS hinges on a major flaw in the Endangered Species Act, discussed here frequently. The ESA recognizes subspecies and populations in mammals, a position at odds with evolutionary biology. Since, as far as the USFWS is concerned, the “eastern” cougar subspecies (Puma concolor couguar) is extinct, any cougar found within its former range is not an “eastern” cougar but a migrant from elsewhere or an escaped pet. Therefore the ESA does not protect them.


* This position was refuted by a 1999 doctoral dissertation from a mammalogist at the University of Maryland. Melanie Culver did mitochondrial DNA analysis of cougar specimens, including as many “eastern” specimens as she could obtain, and concluded that all North American cougars north of Nicaragua are sufficiently genetically similar that then would belong to the same subspecies (assuming “subspecies” has any validity). This would include the endangered Florida subspecies, Puma concolor coryi.


* A further interesting conclusion from Culver’s dissertation is the suggestion (based on the mitochondrial “clock”) that cougars speciated in the Brazilian highlands about 300 kya; the oldest known cougar fossils are also about 300 ky old. South and Central American populations can be divided into 5 “subspecies” based on DNA evidence (in this context there are clusters of genetic information that can be sorted into groups by Principal Components Analysis or some similar technique. You can call these groups “subspecies” if you want). The lack of genetic diversity in the North American population could be explained if the entire population was extirpated 10-12 kya – i.e., during the Pleistocene megafauna extinction – and recolonized from the Central American population.


* The USFWS response to the Culver dissertation was to circle the wagons and say it was “studying” the situation.


I can see why radical environmentalists might have mixed feelings on the “eastern” cougar situation. If you deny that there is such a thing as a subspecies a lot of the ESA falls apart – no more Dusky Seaside Sparrow, no more Mt. Graham Red Squirrel – and for that matter, no more Florida panther. Cougar populations are not endangered – in fact, they’re increasing – in the Rockies and points west. You could reintroduce cougars into a lot of eastern habitats, just as wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. Some of the articles collected by the editors speculate and attempt to map cougar habitat in the east, with places like the Great Smoky Mountains and the Adirondacks as potential locations, usually based on whitetail deer populations. A couple of the contributors do note tentatively that cougars really don’t need whitetail deer to survive as long as there are livestock, dogs, joggers, and toddlers, but point out that there are many more people killed annually by dog attacks and car-deer collisions than documented human cougar kills in the entire history of North America.


My personal feeling? Well, I don’t know. I live just outside “prime cougar habitat” and would love to see one in the wild – hopefully at least simultaneously with it seeing me. I’d also like to see the ESA revised to take a realistic view of evolutionary biology. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are wild cougars in the eastern US and Canada – radio-collared male cougars are documented to turn up 300 miles from their original capture point. Still, I can see how suburbanites might be just a little anxious about having them in the neighborhood.


As mentioned, the book is strangely put together, reading like a collection of reference documents hastily patched together rather than an organized work. I wonder if there was an attempt to get it to publication before a competing book? It badly needs more background biology and the ESA, particularly an explanation of just what a subspecies is – if it’s anything at all. It could also use more detail on the autecology of existing cougar populations. There are a number of black and white illustrations, usually of hunters posing with supposed eastern cougars. There are adequate maps, showing things like the original cougar range; locations of well-documented eastern cougars identified by type (i.e., photograph, scat, specimen, etc.); and the geography of the original number of claimed subspecies based on morphology (32) versus the number of groups identified by genetics (six, five of which are in Central or South America). There are a lot of references – not only does the book as a whole have multiple pages of bibliography, but each independent paper or article incorporated into the text includes its own book list. Not that much use for casual reading but a good reference text.… (altro)