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What about Vermont and Maine?
Cougars (more precisely the eastern cougar or Puma concolor couguar) once roamed the forested mountains of Vermont and Maine. Some believe they still do. Others think they were unlikely to have survived. Not only was a bounty paid for each cougar killed, but by the 1800s much of the forests had been cleared by settlers, and the deer population had been drastically reduced by overhunting by humans. In 1878, so few deer existed in Vermont that 17 deer were imported from New York State (Kobalenko 1997).
What was thought to be the last wild cougar was killed in Maine in 1938, but Hal Hitchcock, a biology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, reported sighting tracks in the 1940s. In 1993 a hunter in Maine claimed to have seen a cougar attacking a bobcat. In 1994 another Maine hunter saw a cougar with two kittens. Tracks from this sighting were confirmed by Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife biologists. In the same year scat found near Craftsbury, Vermont, was confirmed to be from a cougar. A photo of a Maine cougar was published in Audubon magazine in May 1994, but was declared a hoax by biologists who scrutinizing the plants in the photo claimed that they were Western not Eastern plants (Bolgiano 1995). What do you think? Could eastern cougars have survived? If not, where did the tracks and scat come from?
Today the Florida panther lives in a fraction of its original range: the remaining expanse of relatively undeveloped lands in southwest Florida. This land includes Picayune Strand State Forest, Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National Preserve, Everglades National Park, Okaloacoochee Slough, State Forest, Dinner Island Ranch Wildlife Management Area, Spirit of the Wild Wildlife Management Area, Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, Corkscrew Regional Ecosystem Watershed (CREW) land trust tracts, and large tracts in cattle ranches, vegetable farms, and citrus groves.
Tropical plants like this ghost orchid
appear nowhere else in the United States
Study the population dot map below of the United States. What do you notice about southwest Florida? It is the largest unpopulated block of land east of the Mississippi River with the exception of northern Vermont and Maine . It is not a coincidence that it is also the only place east of the Mississippi where panthers are found. Florida is at the crossroads between the tropics and the more temperate zone of the eastern United States.
You will also find more plants here than in any other eastern state. About 1,600 plant species grow in south Florida, many of which are tropical (Maehr 1997).
Examine this map of the United States where white dots indicate people. Notice one of the largest black spots (unpopulated areas) east of the Mississippi is in southwest Florida (just smaller than northern Vermont and Maine).