Felis concolor
The Spanish translation for Cougar is Puma
Home: Cougars live in forests, grasslands, swamps and semi-desert areas in North America, Mexico, Central and South America. There are even wild cougars roaming the Texas hill country.
Food: Cougars eat a variety of food from small rodents to fully grown deer.
Size (length with tail & weight): 5.5 to
7.5 feet
70 to 220 pounds
Life Span: 15 to 18 years
Cougar Trivia:
- Puma, Mountain Lion, panther, painter are all
different names for the Cougar.
- Cougars are very adaptive and can live in a
variety of environments.
- A Cougar can see 6 times more clearly in dim
light than a man.
- A Cougar growls, hisses, whistles like a bird
and can scream like a human.
- Cougar cubs have spots that disappear when
they reach adulthood.
- Each Cougar at the Austin zoo eat 5 pounds of
meat per day. One day each week, the Cougars are given a femur bone
which helps to clean their teeth. Cougars can develop kidney problems
if they are overweight.
- In the wild, these big cats will eat more at one setting, but they will not eat as often.
Endangered Status
Only the Florida Panther is endangered. Like the lions, tigers and leopards, the cougars are losing their home lands to man's buildings. In the process, their food supply is disappearing. Cougars are also hunted and killed as a threat to livestock.
Our Meet the Animals section includes research from the following websites:
The Austin Zoo's website: www.austinzoo.org.
Spanish translations courtesy of the Austin Zoo.
Rolling Hills Refuge Wildlife Conservation Center http://www.rhrwildlife.com/animbot.htm
The Birmingham Zoo http://www.birminghamzoo.com/
The WWW Virtual Library: Zoos http://zoonet.home.mindspring.com/www_virtual_lib/zoos.html
Photographs in Our Meet the Animals Section from PrintMaster Platinum v8.0 software.
Research on farm animals came primarily from http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/