CEO Note: Cougar Comeback – 1st in Minnesota in a century
By Glenn Hurowitz, Founder & CEO
For the first time in a century, wild lion kittens were confirmed born in Minnesota. Mom and family are doing well, as this jaw-dropping footage from University of Minnesota Voyageurs Wolf Project shows:
Coming just a year after a wild mom and kittens were captured on film in Michigan, the birth gives hope for a restoration of forest health across the Upper Midwest and beyond. When mountain lions (aka cougars, panthers, catamounts, or pumas) were extirpated more than a century ago, the East was 80% deforested and whitetail deer were hunted to the brink of extinction.
Now, with diminished pressure from agriculture and better hunting laws, the forests have come back, and so have the deer – even to the point of overpopulation. These forests are missing the keystone species that once ruled the land: the American lion. As a result, Lyme disease, chronic wasting disease, and vehicle collisions have become widespread, and the forests themselves are out of balance.
Both the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and Michigan Department of Natural Resources are protecting these families – and giving them the chance to breed and expand their population.
However, these two lion families, hundreds of miles apart, are just a fragile beginning. Female lions don’t typically roam far from their home range. We hope the state wildlife agencies will consider proactive strategies like reintroducing additional female lions from the West to accelerate recovery and help establish a stable and self-sustaining population over the long term.
Further east, the lions will need more active help from humans because of a gauntlet of highways and other obstacles. That’s why Mighty Earth is calling for northeastern states to “bring catamounts home” – so Eastern forests can also come back to life and humans can enjoy these majestic animals and the ecological benefits they bring.
If you want to learn more about our on-the-ground campaign to restore lions to the East, listen to the spellbinding interview that rewilding guru (and Mighty Earth advisory board member) Ben Goldsmith conducted with our own Renee Seacor and the great Emily Carrollo at Panthera (available at Spotify, Apple, YouTube).
Once you’ve done that, subscribe to Ben’s podcast Rewilding the World. It’s 20 delightful minutes a week of stories like this one: how local conservationists are restoring animals and ecosystems around the world, little doses of much needed but real good news for Nature.
Bison and Ted Turner
We lost “Captain Planet” this week with the death of media mogul Ted Turner. Turner bought, conserved and restored 2 million acres of American prairie, and repopulated it with native bison, wolves, and other wildlife – becoming that largest private landowner in America. He also funded nature and climate work around the world, from his $1 billion pledge that created the UN Foundation, to establishing the Turner Endangered Species Fund, to creating the popular Captain Planet animated environmental series. He was a rewilding visionary.
Turner’s work remains vital to the rejuvenation of the American West today amidst the Trump administration’s tragic assault on nature. The same day he died, news hit that the Trump administration is planning to kick bison off 63,000 acres of federal land that are leased by the outstanding NGO American Prairie Reserve in Montana – and give them over to the meat industry.
Meat industry extremists are arguing that these few acres need to be occupied by yet more land for grazing cows – even though cattle already occupy 659 million acres in the United States alone, the largest single land use of any type in the country. In contrast, although bison have had a revival thanks to more than a century of efforts to bring them back from extinction by tribes, conservationist, and government, they still number just 500,000 – one sixtieth of their historical numbers.
I am grateful for Turner’s foresight in establishing privately owned reserves for bison and wildlife, which can be a refuge amidst the current assault. We shouldn’t have to rely on private efforts like these, but they can be a vital part of the “perfect storm” of strategies we need to restore nature in America.
—
© 2026. The text of this article is openly licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-ND 4.0); you are free to copy and redistribute or republish the article in its entirety with attribution and credit.
