09/26/2026
To all my Midwest photo friends. This is important to keep in the back of your mind is you are planing on shooting colors in Northern MN. I’m sure there are many more than eluded to in this article. As was the case in southern IL a few years back.
A GPS collar on a deer in northern Minnesota sent a mortality alert on March 25, 2026. When the researcher hiked in to find the body, it was buried under leaves on a hillside. That is how cats cache their kills. Wolves do not bury prey. Bears do not bury prey in March. A deer hidden under a pile of leaves meant a cougar, and Minnesota had not confirmed a wild cougar raising young in over 100 years.
Sean Johnson-Bice, a research scientist with the University of Minnesota's Voyageurs Wolf Project, had collared the deer for a winter survival study. The collar was not designed to find cougars. It was designed to tell researchers when a deer died and what killed it. When Johnson-Bice reached the carcass and saw the cache, he set two trail cameras over the body and left.
Four hours later, two cougar kittens walked into the frame.
That evening, the cameras recorded their mother arriving with a third kitten. All four cougars fed, groomed, growled, and rested around the deer over the following hours. The cameras captured roughly four hours of close footage. Thomas Gable, the Voyageurs Wolf Project's lead, described watching the playback: looking at the footage was and still is surreal. We never anticipated seeing four cougars together in northern Minnesota. The mother groomed her kittens. The kittens growled and hissed at each other over the carcass. The family behaved as if no human had ever been within miles of them, which in that stretch of forest south of Voyageurs National Park, was probably true.
Minnesota DNR research biologist John Erb estimated the kittens at seven to nine months old based on their size and physical development, placing their birth in the fall of 2025. The only other cougar kittens ever confirmed in Minnesota turned out to be captive escapees, a female with two young that appeared on a homeowner's porch in 2001.
Cougars were native to Minnesota before being hunted out. Individual adults, almost always young males dispersing from populations in the western Dakotas and Nebraska, have been turning up across the state for years. The Voyageurs Wolf Project's own camera network, hundreds of trail cameras deployed across northeast Minnesota for wolf research, had recorded lone cougars eight times since 2023. A solitary male passing through is a data point. A female with three kittens born in the state is something different. It means a female traveled to Minnesota, found enough prey and cover to survive, found a male, bred, denned, gave birth, and kept three kittens alive through a northern Minnesota winter. Every step in that chain had to work.
Erb was careful about what the discovery means. Although this is an important starting point for potential population establishment in Minnesota, predicting the future is extremely difficult, he said. These kittens might not survive, potentially getting killed by wolves, a male cougar, or vehicles. They may also become part of the founding catalyst for a slow but steady increase in numbers.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, April 30, 2026 / Thomas Gable and Sean Johnson-Bice, Voyageurs Wolf Project, University of Minnesota / John Erb, Minnesota DNR / MPR News / Outdoor News.
