On March 6, 2025, a trail camera in Ontonagon County photographed two cougar kittens. Brian Roell, the Michigan DNR’s large carnivore specialist, called it “the first time in over 100 years that verified cougar reproduction has occurred east of the Mississippi River.”
Wayne Fisher read that and thought about the Dead River Basin.
He was fishing about a mile from the 510 public boat launch, down on the right in a little backwater as you leave it, he told us. Four cougar kits came out onto the shore, one at a time. Then a growl from the brush behind them. “It was the mother, but she never came out, I didn’t see her, and I was probably 75 yards away but their tails gave them away.”
He does not think he ever reported it. He did mention it to a DNR officer a few years later, he says, and the officer just smiled.
That was fifteen years ago. It cannot be verified and never will be. That gap is this story.
What the DNR Counts as Proof
There is a difference between being seen and being confirmed, and that gap has been decades wide.
The DNR’s standard is physical: “carcasses, DNA evidence, tracks, photos, and other sign verified by experts.” An eyewitness account does not meet it. The last wild cougar legally taken in Michigan was near Newberry in 1906, and for decades after that the department’s position was that there were none left to see.
Patrick Rusz, director of wildlife programs at the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy, has argued for decades that cougars never entirely left, which the DNR disputes. How sighting reports were received is less contested. They “were not only not accepted by the DNR but met with animosity,” he has said, and the people making them “were ridiculed and called crazy.”
The People Who Were Told They Were Wrong
The DNR has been saying no cougars in the area since I was a kid and I am 83.
Maryann Whitty
When we posted Michelle Hill’s confirmed footage last week, the other half of that record showed up underneath it.
Susan Deaner was driving home from the grocery store in Cedarville in 1990, heading east on M-134, when something crossed just before St. Martin Point Road: “a large catlike creature with a tail like a thick rope and longer than its body.” Her husband and her neighbor did not believe her. The men at work gave a different answer: “they said unreliable cuz im a woman.”
Natalie Wisehart’s father and sister saw one in the 1970s: “DNR denied lions existed in the UP.”
Then the Cameras Arrived
What changed was not the animal. It was the camera.
Michelle Hill’s cougar walked past a mill yard security camera between Marquette and Big Bay at 12:10 a.m. on August 29 this year. She sent the stills in. Roell wrote back that they agreed it was a cougar, and that her report would be added to the confirmed list.
As of October 1, 2026, the Michigan DNR’s confirmed-sightings dashboard lists 207 confirmed cougar sightings in the Upper Peninsula since 2008, 208 statewide. The last running total the DNR published in December was about 168. By the end of June its count for this year stood at thirteen. All in the Upper Peninsula.
Rusz has a phrase for what technology produced.
Evidence you can’t ignore.
Patrick Rusz
None of this makes the old standard wrong. An agency that confirmed every report would be confirming bobcats and house cats. As of October 1, 2026, the DNR’s dashboard lists 42 cougars from 39 reports in 2025, still the most since 2008. The bar is doing its job.
But a bar built to keep bad reports out keeps good ones out too, and there is a difference between telling somebody their sighting cannot be checked and telling them it did not happen. For decades, Yoopers got the second answer.
The DNR does not claim to have it figured out. After the kittens turned up on a second camera in December, nine months after anyone had last seen them, Roell named the part nobody can explain. “The interesting thing is, where were they for nine months? That’s a mystery.”
The DNR takes sighting reports online. For scat, tracks or a carcass, call your local DNR customer service center, or the Report All Poaching line at 800-292-7800 after hours, and do the one thing that decides it: “Be careful to not disturb the area and keep physical evidence intact until it can be investigated.”
Correction, October 1, 2026. This article previously said the Michigan DNR had confirmed about 168 cougar sightings since 2008 and 31 cougars in 2025. Both were updated to match the DNR’s confirmed-sightings dashboard: 207 in the Upper Peninsula since 2008, and 42 cougars in 2025 (39 reports).
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Sources, credits, and reporting details
Sources & accountability
How this story was reported
Editorial methodOriginal reporting
Last verifiedOct. 1, 2026
Corrections statusCorrection, October 1, 2026. This article previously said the Michigan DNR had confirmed about 168 cougar sightings since 2008 and 31 cougars in 2025. Both were updated to match the DNR’s confirmed-sightings dashboard: 207 in the Upper Peninsula since 2008, and 42 cougars in 2025 (39 reports).
AI assistanceInterviews conducted by the author. Every account is named and quoted with permission. AI tools assisted with drafting. Tool: Claude (Anthropic).
Verification note: Corrected Oct. 1, 2026: the confirmed-sighting count was updated from about 168 to 207 (Upper Peninsula) to match the Michigan DNR’s confirmed-sightings dashboard, and the 2025 figure from 31 to 42 cougars (39 reports). Ledger establishes the about-168 confirmed sightings since 2008 and the DNR's own hedge on that number, the March 2025 Ontonagon County cubs and their December re-sighting, the 13 sightings reported in the first half of 2026, and the DNR's physical-evidence standard. Reader accounts come from direct Messenger interviews and public comments on the Yooper Hub Page, not from secondary coverage. Wayne Fisher gave permission to be named and is identified in the piece; his backwater location detail and his corrected 75-yard distance are both reflected in the text.
Primary sources
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Mystery solved: Elusive cougar cubs documented again in Michigan — Michigan Department of Natural Resources
Published Dec. 18, 2025. Accessed Sep. 21, 2026.
Read in full on michigan.gov this session. The release is the origin of the about-168 figure; the word about is the DNR's own, and the piece keeps it.
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Questions and answers about cougars in Michigan — Michigan Department of Natural Resources
Accessed Sep. 21, 2026.
The DNR's standing reference page, not a dated release. Quoted for the evidence standard and the reporting procedure; the 1906 Newberry record appears here.
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Reader interviews, Yooper Hub Facebook Page — Yooper Hub
Published Sep. 20, 2026. Accessed Sep. 21, 2026.
Supports: Every reader account in the piece. Susan Deaner and one reader who asked not to be named were interviewed directly in Messenger on Sept 20-21, 2026. Maryann Whitty and Natalie Wisehart are quoted from public comments on the Page cougar reel.
Private Messenger threads on the Yooper Hub Facebook Page. No public link exists; the threads are one-to-one conversations with the readers named, who each agreed to be quoted. Screenshots are held in the editorial file.
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Confirmed cougar sightings dashboard (Confirmed sightings, all data) — Michigan Department of Natural Resources
Accessed Oct. 1, 2026.
Read Oct. 1, 2026. Dashboard states “2008 to present”, updated regularly, with no snapshot date. The Upper Peninsula figure is calculated: 208 statewide minus 1 Lower Peninsula sighting (June 21, 2017). The DNR notes some sightings may be the same animal seen by different people.
Additional reporting
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Cougar cubs spotted in Michigan wild for first time in 100 years — CBS News Detroit
Accessed Sep. 21, 2026.
Used only for the March 6, 2025 date and the Ontonagon County location. The DNR's own release says early March, so the precise date is attributed to coverage rather than to the state.
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Michigan has reported 13 cougar sightings so far in 2026 — WXYZ Detroit
Published Jun. 26, 2026. Accessed Sep. 21, 2026.
The mid-year 2026 figure. The piece follows WXYZ in calling the 13 reported, not confirmed; that distinction is the subject of the article and is not smoothed over.
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Cougar sightings rise in Upper Peninsula after years of skepticism — Bridge Michigan
Accessed Sep. 21, 2026.
The source for Patrick Rusz. All three quotes are Bridge Michigan's; Yooper Hub did not interview him.
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Are There Mountain Lions in the Upper Peninsula? — Yooper Hub
Accessed Sep. 21, 2026.
Supports: The Michelle Hill trail-camera footage detail and Brian Roell reply to her.
Yooper Hub's earlier explainer. Source of the Michelle Hill trail-camera detail and Brian Roell's reply to her, and the internal link in the piece.
Photo and media credits
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Cougar foot print — Diane Renkin, National Park Service — National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons
Featured image record. Published Oct. 30, 2020. Accessed Sep. 21, 2026. Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government).
Supports: Featured image (attachment 2954).
Photograph by Diane Renkin, National Park Service, taken 2020-10-30. Original 5760×3840; published at 2000×1333, JPEG q0.85. Downscale only: no crop, no retouching, no AI. Credit runs in both the caption and the alt text.
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