An acquaintance of mine probably wasn't surprised to hear about the cougar that wandered northern Wisconsin from January through May in 2010, disappeared, and then died June 11 after getting SUV'd on a Connecticut highway.
Talk about missing your exit and ending up in the wrong town.
My acquaintance can relate. Years ago, he became tired while driving on I-90/I-94, so his wife took the helm near Mauston.
Before dozing off, he reminded her to take I-90 to La Crosse when the highways forked in 25 miles.
No problem, she said. When he awoke, they were pulling off to gas up. In St. Paul.
No problem. They found a motel room, slept off their irritation and took Highway 61 to La Crosse at dawn. The Mississippi River is so pretty in autumn.
Wayward cougars seldom find solace in alternative routes. You'll recall the cougar that fled a barn near Milton in winter 2008, only to be shot dead by police in mid-April on Chicago's North Side.
Likewise, wandering cougars have been road-killed by Missouri motorists and gunned down by Iowa farmers. In most cases, the cougars are young males dispersing from South Dakota's Black Hills.
Biologists believe the cats are simply looking for turf to call home; a place with food, shelter and breeding-age females. The cougars typically find some chow and cover, but keep searching when failing to wind a feminine feline. They eventually run out of luck and die too young.
At least the Connecticut cougar left his mark. According to Adrian Wydeven, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources biologist, the cougar's romp to Milford, Conn., covered 1,055 miles on a straight line from Champlin, Minn., where it was first seen by police in December 2009. That's a record. Assuming its trip actually began in the Black Hills, the straight-line distance was 1,800 miles.
This was Wisconsin's fourth confirmed cougar sighting in the past three years. All were young males.
Be assured, confused cougars and mystified motorists aren't the only critters going astray. During recent decades, biologists have attached high-tech tags and collars on fish, birds and mammals to document their movements. Every now and then, they get bad directions.
For instance, a lake sturgeon tagged in Lake Winnebago was later netted in Lake Huron and again in Lake Erie. Sometime later, it washed ashore dead in Erie's southwestern basin near Sandusky, Ohio; about 400 miles on a line from Oshkosh.
But sturgeon are fish, not birds, so it had to swim at least 650 miles to get there. It swam down the lower Fox River past De Pere, up the length of Green Bay, across Lake Michigan, beneath the Mackinac Bridge, down Lake Huron, down the St. Clair River, through Lake St. Clair, past Detroit, and then to Lake Erie. There it died, presumably from exhaustion.
As with cougars, young male bears often wander lovelorn after Mom forces them out. One notable black bear shuffled 314.3 miles from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to Baton Rouge, La., in 1996.
Wolves are no better. A young male from northern Minnesota holds North America's "Wrong Way Corrigan" record among Canis lupus for its 550-mile jaunt to Saskatchewan. An Upper Peninsula wolf holds the Great Lakes region record for its 447-mile spree to north-central Missouri.
Not far behind is a Wisconsin wolf that loped 428 miles in 2003 from Black River Falls to Winchester, Ind. Just a few more miles, and it would have made Ohio.
The world record, however, is the 678-mile expedition of a Norwegian wolf to the Finland/Russia border.
Impressed? Don't be.
A male lynx from British Columbia was once trapped, shipped and released in the Rocky Mountains to try rebuilding Colorado's lynx population. After ditching researchers in 2007, it hiked 1,240 miles back home. It died three years later in a trap set near Nordegg, B.C.
White-tailed deer can't compete with such endurance runners. Among the notables, though, is a doe from northeastern Minnesota that hoofed 104 miles in 1993. In addition, a yearling buck traveled 99.82 miles in 1981 after leaving its study area in east-central Illinois.
Contact Patrick Durkin, a free-lance outdoors writer, at patrickdurkin@charter.net or write to him at 721 Wesley St., Waupaca, WI 54981.
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