Last summer, a wildlife photographer saw, or believed he saw, a mountain lion in South Burlington, Vermont. While it’s possible, it is also remarkable: the apex predator was rendered extinct in northern New England in 1881 and the nearest confirmed breeding population is in North Dakota, 2,000 miles (3,200km) away.
But there could be in years hence more definitive sightings if Mighty Earth, a US-headquartered rewilding organization, convinces state and local authorities, along with Vermonters in general, that returning the top-level predator – known in various regions as the cougar, puma, panther and, in the north-east, catamount – to the region.
According to a survey by the Cougar Research Collaborative, Vermonters supporting the idea outnumber opponents by 12 to one. “Scientists and researchers have identified suitable habitats throughout the north-east for catamount recovery,” said Renee Seacor, the group’s north-eastern rewilding director.
Vermont is not alone in perhaps becoming a home for mountain lions in the US. In New York state a viral video of a mountain lion recently caused a frenzy. In Kansas, trail cams have caught the creatures on film. In fact, there have been 117 sightings in the state since 2007, and 65 of them have happened in the last two years.
Other sightings have come in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states. While many could be other creatures, like bobcats or escaped exotic pets, most experts accept that mountain lions are returning to the east of the US, where they once roamed.
But in Vermont, Mighty Earth is unusual in its active campaign to bring them back home. The group has launched what it calls “catamount conversations” in the state, focusing on the predator’s history in the region and what it would mean to bring them back.
“They were once a keystone species and played a vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and bolstering biodiversity,” said Seacor. “We’ve been sitting down with Vermonters and getting into what it would mean to live alongside this species again.”
Seacor said reintroducing mountain lions could benefit ecosystems in need of a dominant apex predator (aside from humans). They would control deer populations and thus reduce damage to vegetation, allowing a broader balance of species to coexist. They would even reduces risks like Lyme disease – which becomes prevalent when deer populations are out of control – and vehicle collisions with deer.
Most concerns about reintroduction efforts center on any potential impact on domestic animals and livestock, and how mountain lions could affect hikers and skiers. But they are considered reclusive and shy, highly avoidant of humans. Figures suggest there have been 30 fatal attacks on humans in the US in more than century.
Farmers in the north-eastern states were originally against mountain lions because they have been known to kill sheep in the past – a natural result of the dwindling numbers of the predator’s natural prey as farmers cleared forests for grazing land. But nearly 150 years since the last mountain lion was killed in Vermont, the area has been allowed to reforest and white-tailed deer populations have exploded, in turn over-browsing the forest floor.
As part of the Vermont effort, Mighty Earth flew in Beth Pratt, director of the National Wildlife Federation in California, who leads the #SaveLACougars campaign, to talk about coexisting with mountain lions in densely populated areas.
“We’re trying to get an understanding of what is the political and social landscape in terms of support and opposition,” said Seacor.
The catamount reintroduction effort sits within a broader drive toward rewilding parts of the US, an effort that runs into, in almost every instance, opposing political and philosophical forces.
Questions about how to manage, or not to manage, US environments that have long been altered by human actions are threaded through the rewilding movement that seeks to restore environments to a more natural, or less managed, state, often by reintroducing top predators.
“There’s tremendous opportunity for re-establishing species that are missing and the ecological processes that are missing in the US in such a way that makes it more natural and less manicured,” said Josh Ginsberg, head of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York.
Ginsberg points to the reintroduction of the beaver, once hunted to near extinction from an estimated population of up to 200 million, but now estimated at between 10 million to 15 million in the US.
Groups like Mighty Earth hold that nature itself holds the key to the challenges of the climate crisis by allowing natural processes to resume, including the reintroduction of apex predators or grazing species like the bison, which once dominated the American prairies.
Reintroducing mountain lions to Vermont as a breeding population could happen naturally but it would take decades, Seacor estimated, as they migrate from the Dakotas to the Carolinas and Tennessee and up the Appalachian chain to the north-east.
Ben Goldsmith, host of the Rewilding the World podcast, said that New England offers an important opportunity for the restoration of species, including mountain lions, because the region has already recovered much of its forest cover and nature was never as comprehensively expunged to the degree it was in the UK.
“Britain has had to focus on proactive nature recovery in a way that America hasn’t, and we are becoming surprisingly good at it,” he said, pointing to a move away from unconditional farming subsidies and toward land management programs that reward stewardship and restoration of nature.
“Britain remains fundamentally afraid of charismatic wildlife, which is why we have struggled to come to terms with the return of beavers and wild boar centuries after wiping them out, and why we have yet to introduce lynx or wolves. Britain can learn from America, where charismatic wildlife has been reintroduced in a number of places,” he adds, pointing to elk, moose, wolves in Yellowstone and Colorado, and mountain lions, which were translocated from Texas to Florida in the 1990s.
But ecologists are hoping for the best. Mountain lions are not a federally protected species, so state wildlife authorities in Vermont would not have to go through federal approval processes if they decide to go forward with studies that would necessarily precede official recolonization efforts.
“You could probably cut the wild-tailed deer numbers significantly if you had a healthy population of mountain lions,” said Ginsberg. “That would allow space for the recovery of oak-dominant forests.”
And after the lions return? “The next stage of rewilding in the forested north-east could be returning animals like elk, forest bison and wolves,” he said. “Certainly that will happen naturally if we give it a hundred years, but there’s a desire to accelerate that with some active restoration.”
This article by Edward Helmore was first published by The Guardian on 18 November 2025. Lead Image: A mountain lion in the Santa Monica mountains. Photograph: Jason Klassi/Getty Images.
