The Cougar's Family Life

Mountain lions, or cougars, are dedicated mothers, and are either pregnant or raising dependent cubs for the majority of their lives.

Tags:
Cougar, Behavior, Habitat, Family Life, Millers Butte

A cougar mother (in rear) rests with her cubs at a den on Miller's Butte, outside of Jackson, WY, during the winter of 1999. © Tom Mangelsen Image of A cougar mother (in rear) rests with her cubs at a den on Miller's Butte, outside of Jackson, WY, during the winter of 1999.

Image of A cougar mother (in rear) rests with her cubs at a den on Miller's Butte, outside of Jackson, WY, during the winter of 1999.

Cougars are mostly solitary animals, except when mothers are raising cubs and when males and females are mating.

Solitary does not mean that cougars do not have a social structure--quite the contrary. Cougars live in low-densities on the land--a single cougar requires from a minimum of 10 to 100 square miles to breed, raise young, hunt, and survive. Both males and females maintain and defend home ranges. They advertise their availability for breeding through a system of feline communication which includes scent marking with scrapes (in tree bark or troughs in the dirt usually made with hind paws which are then often urinated or defecated on) and vocalizations. Females can be tolerant of slight overlaps in their territories with other females. However, males will defent their home ranges against trangressions by other males.

Mountain lions, or cougars, are dedicated mothers, and are either pregnant or raising dependent cubs for the majority (76%) of their lives.

Cougars are dedicated mothers, and are either pregnant or raising dependent cubs for the majority (76%) of their lives. Mothers spend an average of 18-24 months raising and apprenticing a single litter to maturity and nurse their young for just the first seven weeks of their lives. Litter size is usually 2-3 cubs. Research in New Mexico by Ken Logan and Linda Sweanor found a cub survival rate of 60-66% in an area where cougars were not susceptible to hunting pressure by humans. As cubs grow, the survival rate of females increases, while that of the males decreases, likely due to greater competition and less tolerance in supporting an overlap in home range by a newcomer male.

Image of Two cougar kittens at play outside their den on Miller Butte, outside of Jackson, WY.

The greatest cause of mortality in many cougar populations is human-related,primarily through sport hunting, illegal poaching, lethal remoival of courgars that prey on livesotck or domestic animals, auto-related deaths, and the orphaning and often subsquent death by starvation/ predation of cubs when their mothers are killed for any of the above mentioned reasons.

Intraspecies competition is a significant source of mortality among cougars. Most male cougars involved as study subjects show battle scars, indicating that cougars fight to defend territories, access to breeding females and food. Males will kill an entire litter of cubs to induce estrus in a female and populate the territory with his offspring; females have been documented as dying in such battles in an attempt to defend her family.