It looks like there's a cougar roaming the Minnesota River valley near Savage.

Pictures snapped by a motion-sensing camera verify recent sightings of the animal in bottomland near a Cargill plant.

Cougar roams Minnesota River bottomland in Savage.

Kerry Kammann

A Cargill worker set up the camera by a freshly killed deer and recorded a number of clear pictures of the cougar.

"I think it lives there," said Con Christianson, furbearer specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

Cougars, also called mountain lions, once were common in Minnesota, but there are few confirmed sightings now. They are common in Western states such as Montana and Wyoming, and in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Christianson, who has worked 34 years for the DNR, has seen the pictures and calls it a well-substantiated report.

Kerry Kammann

"It wouldn't surprise me if an animal like that could make a living there," he said.

"We have had prior reports," Christianson said.

A bowhunter called last fall, saying he thought he had seen a cougar running from a dead deer in the bottomland in Burnsville, just downstream from Cargill's plant in Savage.

This spring, several Cargill employees saw the cougar, and word spread among workers. Kerry Kammann, a Cargill utility worker, and co-worker Kenny Beahan went out April 9 and found what appeared to be cougar tracks near a freshly killed deer.

Savage cougar killed at least one deer.

Kerry Kammann

The tracks, behind Cargill grain elevators, were round and "big as a burger Whopper," Kammann said. "We thought, 'We got one big nasty cougar out here.' "

That night he bought the camera and set it up in a tree near the deer carcass, he said. That deer had claw and bite marks on its neck and face; they found another, older deer carcass about 30 feet away.

Kammann talked to two other employees, who said they had seen the big cat about 7 a.m. one day about 40 feet from the grain elevator. They said it fled when it saw them.

Kammann said he doesn't have any safety concerns, because experts say cougars rarely attack people.

"He has plenty to feed on in the river bottoms -- deer and turkey," Kammann said. "He has a real buffet going on."

Christianson said this is the only case he is aware of in which a cougar appeared to be living in Minnesota and wasn't just passing through. Cougars' ranges cover large areas, and this could be the one spotted in Plymouth and Maple Grove a few years ago, he said.

The only other DNR-confirmed sighting in the Twin Cities area was when a cougar was caught on a surveillance camera in June 1997 at a Fingerhut parking lot in Plymouth. Police there reported three sightings in 1999.

In 1992, a 150-pound cougar was captured in Worthington. The last confirmed Minnesota sighting was by an Aitkin County man who shot a cougar on his porch last August, Christianson said. An autopsy found that the animal had been starving and had leaves in its stomach, he said, which led him to believe that it couldn't survive in the wild and had been a pet.

The Savage cougar could have been a pet, but if so, it appears to have adapted because it apparently killed at least one deer, he said.

Are authorities concerned about a cougar roaming the Minnesota River Valley?

"It's not caused any real problems," Christianson said. He noted that people live, knowingly or not, among bears in parts of Minnesota, including areas not far north of Forest Lake.

Cougars are protected by law, he said, adding: "If local government thinks it is a safety problem, we'll talk about it."

-- Jim Adams is at jadams@startribune.com .