Re-wilding
The Middle Atlantic region is one that historically had a healthy population of cougars but it is also a region that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was heavily cleared and/or logged and game was decimated. The land since then has become heavily reforested and game has returned. Today, deer are very abundant making it potentially a good environment for the return of cougar to the landscape. However, there does not appear to be any evidence of either transients or remnant populations at this time. The occasional confirmations are most likely escapees or intentional releases and/or their progeny.
Yup. It is RE Wilding.
Rewilding and Biodiversity - Goals for Continental Conservation
Rewilding as a Responsibility
In addition to the scientific justifications for rewilding there are ethical and aesthetic justifications, although some are specific to the North American situation. First, there is the ethical issue of human responsibility. In many regions the deliberate government policy has been to exterminate large carnivores. Unfortunately, this practice continues. The federal agency charged with this task, Animal Damage Control (recently renamed Wildlife Services) still exists. Because carnivores are generally long-lived, produce few young, and nurture those young over a long period of time, their capacity to recover from over-hunting or extirpation campaigns is relatively limited (Noss et al. 1996, Weaver et al. 1996). This underlines the need, if only temporary, for benign human intervention in the form of reintroduction or augmentation of carnivores.
Second, by insuring the viability of large predators, we restore the subjective, emotional essence of "the wild" or wilderness. Wilderness is hardly "wild" where top carnivores, such as cougars, jaguars, wolves, wolverines, grizzlies, or black bears, have been extirpated. Without these components, nature seems somehow incomplete, truncated, overly tame. Human opportunities to attain humility are reduced.
Nonetheless, rewilding is not the only goal of most regional reserve design efforts. The Wildlands Project encourages planning groups to address the major "wounds" or ecological insults caused by abusive land uses of the past that require redress, a notion that is easily traced to Aldo Leopold and other early ecologists (Foreman, in prep.). Among the most common of these wounds to wildlands is the extirpation of large predators, but there are several others that often require treatment, including overgrazing and destruction of riparian habitats, irrigation and hydroelectric projects, poor forestry practices, over-fishing, habitat abuse and stress in animals from mechanized recreation, introduction of exotic species, draining or pollution of wetlands, and habitat changes stemming from decades of fire suppression. Rewilding does not address all of these, but it is one essential element in most efforts to restore fully functioning ecosystems. Repairing all past insults requires a comprehensive effort. We encourage the use of focal species (Miller et al. In press) when addressing these wounds.