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^{Robert Hubner}

One of the first sights to greet visitors to Cle Elum-Roslyn’s Walter Strom Middle School is a cougar skeleton. Prowling a display case in the main hallway, the bony beast is a stand-in for the school mascot, the “Wildcat.” It also has another, closer tie to the students here: they are the ones who stripped and cleaned the bones and reassembled them into a fully articulated skeleton.

Gary Koehler, a state wildlife biologist, had found the cougar, which he thinks was killed by an elk, and brought it to the school for necropsy (autopsy) by students in the Project CAT (Cougars And Teaching) program. Koehler and former school superintendent Evelyn Nelson launched Project CAT in 2000 as a way to get kids excited about real-life research. Activities range from identifying animal tracks in the lower grades, to eighth-graders and high-school students going on capture outings with biologists. The capture trips are a great favorite, but the necropsies run a close second.

“It was amazing,” says Kevin White, who was a junior in high school when the program started. “You don’t really see the muscle mass until you skin it out. The whole body of those animals is just incredible.”

White graduates from WSU this year with a degree in wildlife biology, and plans to begin a master’s program with Rob Wielgus in the fall. He says he was already thinking of a career in wildlife biology when the program began.

Most of the other students in Project CAT have other goals. That’s fine with eighth-grade science teacher Trish Griswold, who says the point of Project CAT is not to recruit new wildlife biologists. The point is to engage students who might otherwise have stayed on the fringes of classroom activities, and encourage them to consider college a viable option for themselves. Besides seeing cougars up close, they get to know working biologists.

This year, WSU graduate student Ben Maletzke took over for Koehler in leading the capture trips. When he drops by Griswold’s classroom after school to find out who will be joining him in the field the next day, junior Josilyn Twardoski and seniors Ryan Nelson and Marcie Maras share their latest cougar news. Maras describes scats she found that might have come from either a cougar or a coyote. Maletzke says they have different shapes and both contain a lot of hair. “This one was all hair,” Maras says.

Project CAT is funded primarily by the state. The nonprofit organization The Cougar Fund has also contributed, and Griswold has won grants from local groups and companies. Plum Creek Lumber, for instance, provides travel money so students can share the results of their work with groups around the state. Last year eighth-graders Spencer Ozbolt, DJ Landes, and Kodi Jones even gave a presentation at an international carnivore conference in Florida.

The students also talk to local groups, such as Kiwanis chapters, about cougar biology and behavior. It’s a great way for the community to learn more about the wildlife in their neighborhood, says Koehler.

“For the most part Project CAT has been very well-received,” he says. “Most people like [the fact] that the kids are getting involved. A lot of them value the rural experience—the kids getting out in the woods and learning about the environment, rather than playing video games.”

Koehler says recent growth makes the Cle Elum-Roslyn area a great laboratory to study how cougars respond to a changing landscape. With new housing developments going up in the middle of historic deer and elk range, more and more people are living and recreating in areas where they might encounter a cougar.

Project CAT gives students, and through them the whole community, the chance to examine questions like how leaving dead livestock on the ground, and feeding the deer and elk, can attract cougars and other predators.

“How we manage ourselves is important,” says Koehler. “What we do is going to dictate whether we can live, or not live, around wildlife.”

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