Where Do Mountain Lions Live? Cougar Range in the Americas

Range from Canada to Patagonia

The cougar spans about 110 degrees of latitude, a greater north-to-south range than any other land mammal native to the Americas. It lives in parts of 20-plus countries, from Canada and the United States through Mexico and all of Central America to nearly every country in South America.

Before European settlement, cougars lived almost everywhere from coast to coast in North America. Heavy persecution in the 1800s and early 1900s wiped them out across most of the East and Midwest. Today the North American range is concentrated west of the Great Plains, while in Latin America the cat still occupies much of its original range, though it is absent from large farmed and urban areas.

Where mountain lions live in the United States

In the US, cougars are found mainly in the West:

• Pacific states: California, Oregon and Washington, from coastal mountains to inland forests. California alone is thought to hold several thousand.
• Rocky Mountain states: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.
• Southwest: Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas, including deserts and canyon country.
• Northern Great Plains: the Black Hills of South Dakota, the badlands of western North Dakota and the Pine Ridge and Niobrara River areas of Nebraska.

The only established population in the eastern US is the Florida panther in southwestern Florida, where an estimated 120–230 adults and subadults live around Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park. Elsewhere in the East, cougars show up only as rare wanderers, as explained in are there mountain lions in the eastern US?

Estimates for the total number of cougars in the western US are commonly in the tens of thousands, but secretive cats spread across huge ranges are hard to count, so figures vary widely.

Mountain lions in Canada and Latin America

In Canada, most cougars live in British Columbia and in western Alberta along the Rocky Mountains. Vancouver Island supports one of the highest cougar densities known. The species has also been confirmed in southern Saskatchewan and, more rarely, in the Yukon and other areas farther north and east.

South of the US, cougars occur throughout Mexico and Central America and across South America: in the Amazon rainforest, the Andes, the Pantanal wetlands, the Gran Chaco, the Brazilian Cerrado and the steppes of Patagonia. In southern Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, some pumas have grown used to vehicles and watchful visitors, making them one of South America’s best-known wildlife sights.

What habitats do mountain lions use?

Despite the name, mountain lions do not need mountains. They are habitat generalists and live in:

• Coniferous and mixed forests of the Rockies and Pacific Northwest
• Deserts and dry scrub of the Southwest and northern Mexico
• Swamps, pine flatwoods and hardwood hammocks in Florida
• Tropical rainforest and cloud forest in Central and South America
• Grassland and windswept steppe in Patagonia
• High Andean slopes up to about 5,800 m (19,000 ft)

What these places share is cover for stalking, such as dense brush, rocky ledges, canyons or forest, and a good supply of prey, especially deer. In the US West, the cougar’s range closely follows that of mule deer and white-tailed deer. In the tropics it overlaps with the jaguar, which tends to dominate in dense lowland forest while the cougar does better in drier, more open or higher areas.

How big is a mountain lion’s home range?

Cougars need a lot of space. Each adult lives alone in a home range whose size depends mostly on how much prey is available:

Ranges are smallest where deer are plentiful and largest in deserts and other places where prey is scarce. A male’s range usually overlaps those of several females, but males avoid each other’s areas and may fight if they meet. Densities range from below one to several cougars per 100 square km (39 sq mi).

Dispersal: how young cougars find new homes

At 12–24 months old, young cougars leave their mother and must find a home of their own. Females often settle near their birth area, but young males are pushed away by resident adult males and may travel hundreds of kilometers.

Some journeys are remarkable. A young male from the Black Hills of South Dakota walked about 2,400 km (1,500 mi) through Minnesota, Wisconsin and New York before he was killed by a car in Connecticut in 2011. Wandering young males like him explain most cougar sightings far from known breeding areas.

Because females disperse much shorter distances, new breeding populations form slowly. Even so, cougars have recolonized parts of the northern Great Plains in recent decades, and in 2025 biologists in Michigan verified cougar kittens in the Upper Peninsula, the first in the state in more than 100 years.