With reports of a mountain lion retreating from a carcass, state officials investigated and have now confirmed that the adult cow elk found in a southern Missouri field was, in fact, killed by a mountain lion.
While there are a number of reported sightings across the great state of Missouri, according to state biologists, there is no known active breeding population of mountain lions inside the state’s borders.
After the dead cow elk was discovered in Shannon County, officials from the state’s Department of Conservation set up trail cameras in hopes of capturing the cat on film. After fielding reports of a mountain lion on the carcass, it didn’t take long for the cat to return to the kill site after the cameras were deployed.
“We set up trail cameras on the carcass to see if the lion would return to it, and indeed that afternoon a lion did return to it,” MDC Furbearer and Black Bear Biologist Bowersack told Field & Stream. “The wounds on the animal were consistent with a predation event. To my knowledge it is rare for a mountain lion to scavenge on a carcasses it didn’t kill itself—so I would say it killed this elk.”
While the department’s Mountain Lion Response Team has fielded six or seven other incidents of mountain lion predation in recent memory, the official stance by biologists and the department is that there are no known populations of lions inside Missouri borders.
Since the response team’s inception in 1994, they have documented 117 confirmed lion sightings, but genetic samples from road-killed lions indicate that these animals have traveled from their home ranges in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.
“The closest confirmed reproducing populations in the region would be in South Dakota or Nebraska,” says Bowersack. “There hasn’t been any confirmed breeding in any Midwestern states yet.”
MDC biologists collected genetic samples from the kill site with hopes of getting a little bit more information about this lion and where he may have traveled from.
Images: Missouri Department of Conservation
