A new duck predator?

This doesn’t really have a direct tie to waterfowl, but most of us are more generalists anyway, right?
The story of cougars – mountain lions – in Minnesota just got a lot more interesting. The animals show up from time to time – like the one hit on a road in Bemidji a year or two ago. But the cougar shot at the end of November in Jackson County is something new altogether.
According to news reports, a guy saw the animal – about a 125-pound male – and watched it go into a culvert. Then he called a buddy and the two chased it from the culvert and shot it. DNR officials say it’s likely the first time, in modern days at least, that someone’s shot a cougar in the state.
Pictures of the dead animal have been making the rounds on the Internet, and the DNR is investigating because cougars are protected in Minnesota.
While many people say they’ve seen cougars, the reality is that there are not that many confirmed sightings. There are some trail camera images that turn out to be the real thing, but not that many are considered confirmed sightings.
Officials say the state does not have a reproducing population of cougars, and that the animals witnessed in this state are likely juvenile males that have trekked from places such as the Dakotas in search of new territory and a mate.
This all is a roundabout way of talking about the effects of predators on duck populations in general. Given that cougars occupy such large territories, it seems rather unlikely they’d eat enough eggs or kill enough hens to impact even a local bird population. But the same can’t be said for other predators such as foxes and raccoons.
If you talk with some duck hunters, they believe with everything they’ve got that a large part of the reason why our annual duck harvest has fallen is because of an abundance of predators on the landscape.
Thoughts?

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