Yet for at least the past 16 years it appears mountain lions from the western United States have made this cross-country trek to end up in Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

While these visits perhaps happened before 2008 — the first year the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar in the state in nearly a century, a cat that sadly ended up killed by law enforcement after somehow ending up in suburban Chicago — the prevalence of trail cameras has raised the frequency of documenting cougar sightings in Wisconsin and the U.P.

Already in 2021, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has received 10 verified reports of cougars in the Upper Peninsula, three of them in Dickinson County, including the most recent photo Sept. 16 in the southern part of the county.

If this trend continues, the Upper Peninsula appears poised to have a modern record for cougar sightings in 2021, topping 15 in 2020.

A TRAIL CAMERA photo Sept. 16 shows a cougar in southern Dickinson County. It is about 50 miles from the most recent previous confirmed sighting in a July 20 video in Baraga County. (Photo provided by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources)

But does that mean more of these impressive large cats are here? Wildlife biologists say no.

It’s a matter of cougar gender and behavior.

Most of the reports this year — perhaps nine of the 10 — could be the same cougar, given the amount of time and distance between records, said Cody Norton, the large carnivore expert for the Michigan DNR.

Only a track found May 12 by a DNR staffer in Luce County, followed by a trail camera image of a cougar the next day in eastern Dickinson County, provides evidence more than one mountain lion may be roaming the U.P., Norton said.

“In one day, for a cat to travel 125 miles is pretty improbable,” Norton explained.

Mountain lions are thought to have the broadest range of any large animal in the Americas, with individuals turning up from the northern Yukon Territory in Canada to the southern Andes in South America.

It is the largest of the wild felines native to North America, with the exception of the few jaguars that can turn up in the Mexican border areas of the southwest.

Despite its size, the cougar is a closer relative to the domestic housecat than panthera species such as lions and tigers.

That the Upper Peninsula has attracted wandering mountain lions makes sense — it is sparsely populated, has good habitat for the cats and decent prey, Norton said.

The U.P. and Wisconsin once had a native population of cougars, earning a prominent mention in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House in the Big Woods,” set in northwestern Wisconsin in the 1870s.

But according to the Wisconsin DNR, the state’s last native mountain lion was killed in 1908. One last was taken legally in the Upper Peninsula in 1906.

Despite local reports that a breeding population lingered in the Upper Peninsula, no female cougars or cubs have been documented since the DNR began recording modern cougar sightings in the U.P.

This fits a pattern for the species, in that young males “disperse” after separating from their mother at about 15 months, driven to set out from where they were born to avoid clashing with their father or other mature males or mating with their mother or sisters.

White-tailed deer do much the same thing, with young bucks venturing from their home range in search of new territory. But with deer, dispersing might mean going to a neighboring county. With cougars, it’s more complicated.

The closest significant cougar population to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula is several states away, in the Black Hills of western South Dakota.

The cougar population in South Dakota for now hovers at about 300 but can fluctuate to as high as 500 or as low as the 260s, said Steve Griffin, a big game wildlife biologist with the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks.

The state does allow them to be hunted, with the aim of maintaining its mountain lion numbers at roughly 200 to 300, Griffin said. In 2020, about 58 cougars were taken in the Black Hills, along with 10 from the prairie areas where the cats are more sparse.

The Black Hills cougars are thought to have spread from Wyoming, reestablished in South Dakota in only the past few decades, Griffin said. In turn, it likely has led to a small breeding population in northwestern Nebraska.

Young male cougars seem “programmed” to leave their natal area, Griffin said. From South Dakota, it might roam to Wyoming, Montana, Canada, Nebraska, even Missouri and Oklahoma.

Obviously, some have headed east and ended up in Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula — one even was struck and killed by a car in Connecticut in June 2011, 1,500 miles from the Black Hills, nearly double the previous known distance traveled by a mountain lion.

But of the females that biologists collared and tracked from South Dakota, all eventually returned to within roughly 50 miles of where they had been born, Griffin said.

So it seems unlikely a female cougar would cross Minnesota — which for now has not documented mountain lions reproducing in the state — to become established in Wisconsin and the U.P.

Considering the distance, Griffin said, “the chances of that happening are slim to none … but never say never.”

So for the dispersing male cougars headed east, arriving in the U.P. can result in a long and futile search for a female. A young male looking to establish a home territory might find the Upper Peninsula inviting but ultimately lonely.

The region becomes a dead end for these roaming young male cougars, Norton said. Crossing either U.P. bridge to continue east or north would be daunting for a wild animal, and the only other potential opportunity would be when the lakes are iced in.

“I think the U.P. is kind of a funnel,” Norton said. “It’s easy to get into, not easy to get through.”

So what happens to these roaming bachelor cougars once they reach that barrier to pressing on east? It’s unclear, but they don’t seem to be setting up permanently in the Upper Peninsula. Norton noted none of the sites where a trail camera recorded the cat has ever captured a second image.

Since the cougars lack strong identifying marks for telling individuals apart, it can’t be determined whether any of these cats even remain in the region through multiple years, Norton said.

But they appear to keep moving, perhaps eventually heading back west. Several young males radio-collared in South Dakota that dispersed east came back, though none were known to have traveled as far as the Upper Peninsula, Griffin said.

So for now, cougars in the Upper Peninsula are short-term residents until a female makes that 900-plus-mile journey to give the males a reason to stay.