(Facebook image by Andrea Herrmann – used with permission)
Residents on the north end of Howard Lake were surprised this week when a motion camera captured an unexpected visitor. What appears to be an adult mountain lion, or cougar, tripped the camera in the overnight hours on Monday.
Adam Stennet, a Conservation Officer with the Minnesota DNR serving our area says while the presence of a mountain lion in our area isn’t common, it’s non unprecedented either…
“…there have been reports from time to time throughout the years of a lone cougar kind of making its way through the county. So, it’s not out of the extreme ordinary, but it’s not a normal occurrence I guess. For those that do happen to see it, if you want you can report it out to the DNR Information Center and they can report it out to our wildlife staff just for their information, but essentially that’s what the DNR would do with it unless it causes a real public safety hazard, or if it’s hanging around a house and won’t go away, or a school or that kind of thing. Otherwise we just kind of let it do its thing.”
Officials say generally, the big cat doesn’t want an encounter with a human any more than the human does. A mountain lion however, may not necessarily respect the difference between a small pet and its own prey, so caution should be taken if there is a confirmed presence of one in the area.
(audio in the on-air story courtesy: Kendell Kubasch / KRWC Radio)
