The Nebraska-born mountain lion was caught on a camera in western Illinois a week ago.
But wildlife authorities there weren’t surprised. That same day, they’d received a call from a state biologist in Nebraska, letting them know the mountain lion’s radio collar had sent a signal from McDonough County, about 85 miles south of the Quad Cities.
And about 10 days before that, the biologist, Sam Wilson of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, had sent the Illinois Department of Natural Resources a first alert: The lion was headed their way — in eastern Iowa at the time but approaching the Mississippi River.
Wilson and others had collared the male in November 2021 in the Niobrara River Valley. They estimated it to be about a year old at the time, about the age when most young males disperse — setting off in search of mates, and their own territories.
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And this one dispersed, more than 600 miles so far.
Its GPS-enabled collar sends Wilson periodic signals, and those showed the lion moving to the south and east. In late July, it passed through Lincoln, where it was caught on a homeowner’s backyard security camera near Northwest 56th and West Adams.
But it kept moving.
“It can be between 3 and 20 miles a day, but it might kill a deer and feed on that for a day or two,” Wilson said. “But mostly it’s walking day after day after day after day after day.”
It keeps walking because it’s not finding what it’s looking for — a mate. Female lions don’t disperse like males, Wilson said. “So in general, there are very few females to be found. And so they just keep moving.”
The lion would have had better luck had it traveled west, toward Nebraska’s other established mountain lion populations in the Pine Ridge and Wildcat Hills areas, or beyond to the Rocky Mountain states.
“If he’s looking for females, he’d find them in the West. It’s unlikely he’ll find females in the East.”
It would have to find its way to Florida to meet a compatible mate, in the population of panthers — a mountain lion subspecies — that live in the swamps and forests of that state’s southwest tip.
Wilson and his staff are monitoring 19 mountain lions with working radio collars, and the visitor to Illinois, caught on a landowner’s camera Oct. 14, is the only one of those to have left the state. But it’s not the first Nebraska cat to make it more than one state away.
In February, a 3-year-old with a Nebraska ear tag was killed during Montana’s hunting season.