Trail Cam Footage Shows Minnesota’s First Wild Cougar Kittens in More Than a Century

Most Minnesota cougar news involves one wide-ranging cat moving through the state. This one involves four. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources announced Thursday, April 30, that video from the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project shows a female cougar with three large kittens in northern Minnesota.

The footage marks the first evidence of cougars reproducing in Minnesota in more than 100 years. It also gives wildlife officials a rare look at what could be the start of something much bigger, though nobody sane is calling it a comeback tour yet.

The video was captured south of Voyageurs National Park. The DNR’s cougar page places the footage northeast of Orr in St. Louis County.

Researchers placed two trail cameras over a GPS-collared deer they suspected a cougar had killed. The cameras then captured a female cougar with three large kittens feeding at the site.

The Voyageurs Wolf Project has deployed hundreds of trail cameras in northeastern Minnesota for wolf research. Since 2023, those cameras have recorded lone cougars eight times, but this was the first time they documented kittens.

Thomas Gable, project lead for the Voyageurs Wolf Project, said researchers captured about 4 hours of footage of the cougar family at the kill. The video included the mother grooming the kittens and the kittens growling and hissing at each other.

First Confirmed Reproduction in More Than a Century

DNR research biologist John Erb estimated the kittens were 7 to 9 months old, which means they were likely born last fall. The DNR said the only other confirmed cougar kittens in Minnesota involved captive escapees in 2001. In that case, a female and two kittens stayed near a homeowner’s porch.

Does Minnesota Have a Cougar Population Now?

The footage doesn’t mean Minnesota has a self-sustaining cougar population. Cougars were once native to Minnesota, but they disappeared from the state after European settlement. Today, the DNR says cougars are rarely seen, though they occasionally show up. From 2004 through early 2026, the agency recorded 180 suspected wild cougar detections in Minnesota, with some likely involving the same animal detected more than once.

Most cougars documented in Minnesota appear to be transient animals from western South Dakota, North Dakota, or Nebraska. Individual adult cougars, often wandering males, have become less surprising across Minnesota and the western two-thirds of the Midwest.