By Nadia Drake
The tale starts with an unidentified body found on the roadside. Hit by a car in the wee hours of the morning, investigators puzzled over where it had come from and how it had reached its asphalt resting place.
But this wasn’t a human murder mystery: The victim was a young cougar, struck down on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Milford, Conn., on June 11. The incident shocked a state where drivers are accustomed to seeing white-tailed deer dash in front of their windshields, not 140-pound predatory cats. On July 26, after working for weeks to piece together the cougar’s story, scientists delivered a surprising saga of the cat’s 2,000-mile journey from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the green lawns of southern New England.
When the young male was killed, investigators initially thought the cat might have been a captive animal — no wild cougars have been documented in Connecticut since the late 1800s.