This is a meeting of your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bugged, bitten, and in my case, underwear-less.

You can't predict anything.

Okay, Jim Williams.

In your book, Path of the Puma.

We gotta talk about that name, we will.

But I'll tell you the thing that's surprising most about that book, like the singular fact that I would have never imagined is that

you're saying here that at the end of the last ice age, so the place is seen, how is seen, transitioned.

When we lost all the crazy animals, everybody likes to think about, like mammoths and massadons.

Did North America lost mountain lions?

Yes, well, so the genetic work that's been done is that mountain lions and other species retracted south for a little while and then recolonized a second time.

So if you had shown up on the Great Plains or the Rockies or anywhere in what we now consider like the lower 48, there was a period in time, 9,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, whatever, when you wouldn't have found them outland.

Potentially, yes, but there were other species of cats here too. There was an American lion.

They went extinct too. Yes, at different times. We don't know exactly, but with the fossil record and now with some of the genetic work with the cats, yes, there was a big retraction where perhaps they weren't there, depending upon where you were.

And then refilled in, like filled back in from South America.

Well, yeah, you got the Central American land bridge and the conditions that were there that were conducive to not only cats, they need something to eat, they have to have prey. So there was probably some mix of, you know, is there food in the grocery store or are there shoppers, you know, or both.

And yes, that's the current thought. And right now, so they refilled in, and is it true that now or was it true at the time of European contact or is it both, I guess, that mountain lines are enjoy the widest distribution of any land mammal in the western hemisphere?

Yes, yes, you're correct on both counts. And if you think about it, you know, there was always always native cultures present and mountain lions and there's a whole bunch of different names for mountain lions as humans and depending upon on tribal culture and ancestor stories.

There's lots of different names depending upon where you're at in the United States and which tribe they play a significant role in pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas.

And then, of course, you know, as this country was settled by white Europeans for the most part, yeah, the cats were here from coast to coast. And slowly but surely, you know, we were really effective at reducing a whole host of species moving west.

Yeah, I want to talk about that project of a limit that are very successful, but not totally successful efforts to eliminate them from the face of the earth.

But what so they can extend from you talk about in your book. That's why I kind of set the table here a little bit. You talk about in your book, there's an area in Patagonia where they pray on penguins.

And then they're all the way up into southern Yukon. Yes, so it's a continuous strand of them extending that distance. Yeah, pretty much. So it's fascinating to me and as a wildlife biologist and particularly working in Montana or in the western United States, per se to find, you know, my colleagues down there picking cats up with penguins in their mouth.

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