A new permanent exhibit at the Manitoba Museum aims to give visitors a close look at the elusive prairie cougar, and the challenges the predator faces in today’s environment.
The exhibit, titled “The Cougar — Manitoba’s Big Cat” tells the story of a cougar born in the Cypress Hills area of southwestern Saskatchewan that eventually covered hundreds of kilometres throughout its 10-year life.
“People can get an up-close look at this amazing animal that travelled well over 1,000 kilometres from where it was born to end up being in Manitoba,” the museum’s curator of zoology, Randall Mooi, told CBC Manitoba’s Information Radio on Wednesday.
The cougar, called SK-10, got its name from the eartag it got as a one-year-old cub in 2011, Mooi said.
It was also fitted with a satellite tracking collar as part of a study by the University of Alberta.
The collar helped researchers track the animal from Saskatchewan to Montana and back again, this time to the Moose Mountain area in southeastern Saskatchewan, not far from the Manitoba border.
Mooi says the cougar covered about 750 kilometres in the first three months of the study — the furthest out of all the cougars the researchers tracked — before the collar eventually malfunctioned.
“But [the cougar] was miraculously found again on some trail cameras in [Manitoba’s] Riding Mountain National Park just a few years later,” Mooi said.
The trail cams captured it in the western Manitoba park from 2016 to 2018.
SK-10 then roamed north to Duck Mountain, where it was found dead in a legal coyote snare in February 2020.
The Manitoba Museum got the call about the cougar from the Manitoba Wildlife branch in 2020, and prepared SK-10 for the exhibit, alongside the Assiniboine Park Zoo, said Mooi.
Now, visitors can explore the cougar’s story through interpretative panels and photos, including pictures from Riding Mountain’s trail cams, and see the predator’s fully mounted skeleton and skin.
Mooi said the exhibit gives people an opportunity to learn about the otherwise enigmatic animal, which prefers forested regions, such as the Duck Mountain, Riding Mountain and Turtle Mountain areas.
Although he said the cats have been in Manitoba likely for thousands of years, they weren’t actually confirmed in the province until 1973.
Cougars have to find a new home range after leaving their mothers, but it’s unusual for them to travel as far as SK-10 did, said Mooi.
He hopes people who visit the exhibit learn cougars do live in Manitoba, and understand the difficulties the animals endure throughout their lifetimes.
“The Prairies and much of Manitoba has been quite transformed by human activities, and the idea that an animal has to travel potentially … 1,000 kilometres from where it was born to try to find a place to live is something that we should ponder and consider in our interaction with the environment,” said Mooi.
A new exhibit at the Manitoba Museum called ‘The Cougar – Manitoba’s Big Cat’ delves into the secretive world of one of Manitoba’s most elusive predators through the story of SK-10, a prairie cougar whose journey through the province captivated wildlife experts. Zoology Curator Randall Mooi takes us behind the scenes of the exhibit.