Trail cameras captured incredibly rare footage of cougar kittens in Minnesota — the first confirmed evidence in more than a century that cougars are reproducing in the state. In late March, remote cameras placed near Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota recorded a female cougar with three large kittens. The video, captured by the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project, is the first documentation of a reproducing cougar population in the state in 100 years. The trail camera footage shows the kittens up close as they feed at a site south of the park. The Voyageurs Wolf Project, which has deployed hundreds of trail cameras across northeast Minnesota for wolf research, has previously recorded lone cougars eight times since 2023. However, none of those recordings included kittens. The newly released footage came from two remote cameras set up by researchers near a GPS-collared deer they believed had been killed by a cougar.…