Guess these tracks.

Great photos! They look like they should be part of a National Geographic spread.

Great photos! Nice to see people hunting with cameras from time to time

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Those are two different cats aren't they? How many were there?

Fabulous photos Jason! Thanks so much for sharing them with us.

I love big cats...and little cats...LOL.

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Beautiful pictures, I didn't realize that Lynx tracks were that big.

Fatrat, there were four, a mom and her three cubs. The first picture is the mom, the second is one of the babies. There is also a male in the area with a collar on it. Here is a picture of them about a 1/2 mile up the road the first time I saw them. I thought it was wolves till I looked through my binoculars. Boy was I excited!

WIHH, I only have ABC and PBS so I haven't seen that one yet. That would really be my ultimate dream job, a photographer for National geographic. One of my favorite shows on PBS though is "Art Wolfe Travels to The Edge."

I was right! I was going to guess lynx. I swore I saw a cougar once, but DH said I was crazy.......I am thinking that maybe I wasn't!

In the late 60's I saw lynx tracks near Emily Lake in northcentral MN.

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I was wrong, its not jumbo kitty. Here I've been tracking this cat for days now Oh well time to go find sasquatch.

Don't know why the photo didn't come through but it showed a cougar near Floodwood, MN. There was as WIHH noted another one hit by a car near Bemidji last year. There was also a confirmed sighting in southern MN last year. So the DNR is wrong because that is three confirmed cougars in the past three years. We are only 90 miles from the Canadian border so maybe they are moving south. There are thousands of acres of reservation and state forest lands up here for them to hide out in.

The DNR has never denied that Minnesota could have cougars in it. What they have said is we do not have a sustainable breeding population, which I will agree with them. We do not. Every confirmed sighting or killed cat in the state has been a male which are known to wander hundreds of miles in search of new territories. Since 1990 there have only been 7 confirmed sighting in MN. We border South and North Dakota which have know cougar population so its no surprise they may occasionally wander through our state. They have also followed some of these cats through Minnesota to Wisconsin and even into Chicago. Showing that they are not residents but transient. Now days with the advances in science and technology all a person in Minnesota needs to do is get a hair sample a fecal sample and they can dna the cat and tell what region it came from. Until, there is a confirmed sighting or a mom and her cubs or a den sites, I am going to believe the DNR. They are more aware of whats going on out in the woods then people think they are. I only live 40 miles from Floodwood and got the pictures before they hit the internet and news paper. With in weeks of them being released people jumped on the band wagon and started making up their own cougar stories. Its amazing how many people in the area have seen black ones, they claim to even have pictures of them in families, black cougars do not exist. Some people have even gone to extreme lengths to make up stories of being attacked and cutting up deer with their knives during deer season and claiming the cougars tried stealing them. Yes, that happened in Cotton, MN. Then there were the internet circulation of all these cougar images taken in the area which were later proven to be from the the Dakotas. I have a friend in Hibbing who believes her horses were attacked by cougars, they were not. They were caught in the fence but she still believes they were because that is what she wants to believe. From my experiences and what I have seen with my own eyes I just have a hard time believing anyone but the DNR.

Here is a great article that describes cougar hysteria and whats going on in the Midwest and why they cannot take every report seriously.

http://www.easterncougarnet.org/Asse...arHysteria.pdf

The paws on that cougar in WIHH's post are GINORMOUS
Just wow!!

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I haven't read the rest of the posts - just want to say those are lynx tracks.

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Ha. Silly me. I guess I should have read all of the posts first.

Great photos, those are beautiful cats.

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When we moved here, to western NC, we kept seeing tracks just like these in a few soft clay/mud areas on our land. After a short while, we noticed some little kitty prints beside the big ones. For over a year we watched the 'little one' grow, and then we didn't see them any more.

If you tried linking to the Star Tribune, they may have anti-linking software on their web server.

This past weekend, in Southern Colorado, a mountain lion followed a woman's dogs through the doggy door into her kitchen. She grabbed her two-year-old and fled to the bedroom, closed the door and called her husband. It took DOW two hours to get there and shoot the lion, who had in the meantime, killed one dog and severely injured two others. The news said the lion weighed only 45 pounds and was obviously severely emaciated. The kitchen was pretty much trashed!! Dogs were small terrier types and it's amazing that some of them just lost eyes. Makes you think twice about doggy doors!!

Thank you. That's the one.
What I am saying jasoninmn is that the DNR said that there were only half a dozen sightings in the past 20-30 years.. There have been three confirmed sightings in the past year so I think that they are wrong.

I am less then 30 miles from Floodwood....maybe I am not as crazy as I thought. It was about 2006 when I thought I saw my cougar.