The Nebraska-born mountain lion rolled into its new Indiana home Friday afternoon like a rock star — with an entourage.
Three Illinois conservation officers. An Illinois state biologist. Two federal hunters.
“He was brought here by quite a caravan,” said Joe Taft, founder of the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in Center Point, Indiana.
Earlier that day, they had sedated the young male lion after it overstayed its welcome in Springfield, Illinois. And now they were delivering it to Taft’s 260-acre sanctuary — and ending the big cat’s 700-mile search for a mate.
Its trip had started not long after Nebraska Game and Parks Commission biologists fit it with a tracking collar in November 2021, in the Niobrara River valley. The animal was judged to be about a year old, roughly the age young males disperse to find a mate and their own territory.
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The lion started moving south and east, and biologists could track its progress through periodic signals from its GPS-enabled collar.
In June, it moved through Lincoln, and was captured on a backyard security camera near Northwest 56th and West Adams streets.
The lion was one of 19 GPS-collared animals the state was tracking, but the first to leave Nebraska. By early October, it had crossed the Missouri River, walked across most of Iowa and was nearing the Mississippi River. Two weeks later, Nebraska officials told their counterparts in Illinois the animal was in McDonough County.
It kept walking, arriving in Springfield — 85 miles to the southeast — on Oct. 26. But then it stopped. And that became a problem.
It was tracked and observed in residential and commercial areas for several days before state wildlife officials and Springfield police determined it “posed an imminent threat to residents and property and therefore needed to be removed,” according to a news release from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
The big cat could have come back: Illinois officials offered to send the mountain lion home, but Nebraska biologists declined.
Nebraska’s lion experts weren’t available Monday, but a Game and Parks spokeswoman pointed to a couple of policies that would prohibit the lion from returning.
First, once an animal — whether deer, elk, lion or other creature — leaves Nebraska, it becomes managed by the state it’s moved into. And Nebraska's mountain lion-specific protocol prohibits the release of a lion farther than 100 yards from where it was captured, and doesn’t allow for the release of a mountain lion from another state.
So after officers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services sedated the mountain lion at about noon Friday, they drove it to Indiana.
Taft opened his sanctuary in 1991, and it houses about 120 big cats — mostly tigers, but also lions, leopards, servals and bobcats. It’s rescued animals from 24 states, from people who owned exotics illegally, or could no longer care for them, or from zoos and other animal attractions that closed voluntarily or lost their licenses.
He plans to immobilize his newest arrival Tuesday, to give it a thorough checkup, but he already noticed signs of an injury on its back — a long, straight scar.
“Like he had something dragged across him,” he said. “Or somebody took a shot and grazed him.”
He and his staff are shoring up an enclosure that used to house three captive-born mountain lions, because he believes the wild-born Nebraska native will challenge every inch of it, looking for a way out.
He ultimately plans to build a new enclosure — 1 to 1.5 acres — for the animal to live out its life. But unlike some of the sanctuary’s captive-born animals, the Nebraskan will never be on public display.
“We’ve had wild cougars here before, and they’ve never been comfortable around people. My assumption is that’s the way he’s going to be.”