FORT COLLINS — GPS tracking data collected from radio collars on mountain lions, lynx, wolves and other wild mammals are challenging scientific understanding of the animals’ range and habitat.

Until about five years ago, the use of GPS technology was limited.

Now, Colorado Division of Wildlife and other Western biologists are tracking more animals using satellites and computers and seeing them wander farther, more frequently and far beyond the bounds of what is believed to be their normal habitat.

Conservationists say even more monitoring is needed to help understand the migration habits of wildlife through an “increasingly humanized landscape,” said Jodi Hilty, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s programs in North America.

“We’re going to see more development,” she said. And understanding wildlife migration is crucial “to make sure we don’t accidentally cut off routes.”

GPS tracking data indicate a dozen of the 218 lynx transplanted into Colorado’s tundra subsequently trekked solo for hundreds of miles — as far as Kansas, Iowa and Alberta, Canada.

A wolf collared near Yellowstone wandered hundreds of miles through Wyoming and Utah, then entered Colorado near Dinosaur National Park and traversed the state in 2009 — to the northern Front Range and back toward Utah — before dying from eating a prohibited poison.

A mountain-lion cub that fell into a north-suburban window well two years ago was hauled by rescuers back to mountains near Estes Park. Then it moved east again, creeping through a dry creek bed to Greeley and onward across Kansas and Oklahoma prairie — sleeping by day in old barns, and eating birds and rodents but no deer, state biologists said. GPS plots show the cat has covered more than 700 miles and is in eastern New Mexico.

“All kinds of large mammals make really long-distance movements,” said Mat Alldredge, a state researcher running one of two mountain-lion projects. “Lions will disperse through hundreds of miles of what we see as nonhabitat. We think mountain lions should be in the mountains. But their historic range was from coast to coast.”

After a suburban SUV driver in Connecticut hit and killed a 140- pound male mountain lion, Eastern wildlife officials last week announced that genetic testing showed the lion had wandered 1,500 miles from the Black Hills of South Dakota. Some Western biologists say the trek may be fairly typical.

“A mountain lion moving 1,500 miles from the northern Great Plains of South Dakota to the forested suburbs of Connecticut is actually not that bizarre at all,” said Jeff Parrish, the Denver-based director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Freedom to Roam Initiative. “We’ve boxed nature in quite a bit, and sometimes she just busts out.”

There are not nearly enough data yet to be able to say what may trigger wild animals to wander.

Colorado biologists hypothesize that wild animals transplanted into the state may wander because they are drawn to the sort of terrain they left. Another explanation may be that young males generally are driven to disperse, seeking new food sources and mates.

The latest signals from M56 — a young male wolverine that was collared in Wyoming and trekked solo for several hundred miles to Rocky Mountain National Park in the spring of 2009 — show he has roamed as far east as the foothills suburb of Bailey and southwest into the mountains near Leadville.

“It’s certainly within the realm of possibility that other wolverines have done that,” said state species conservation coordinator Eric Odell.

A lynx that wandered from Colorado’s San Juan mountains to an area near Wichita was hauled back to the mountains, state biologist Jake Ivan said. Then that lynx headed east again and was killed by a car southwest of Des Moines, Iowa.

Another lynx, a male that fathered two sets of kittens in Colorado, moved solo across hundreds of miles into central Canada, where trappers caught him last year, Ivan said.

“It had come from Canada. Maybe it’s one that was trying to get back,” he said.

A young female moose in 2009 wandered from mountains near the Continental Divide to Broomfield, where she slept in ditches before wildlife sharpshooters tranquilized her for relocation.

Growing evidence of long-distance wandering “will help us figure out how to plan for and manage wildlife,” Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Theo Stein said. “We may have had a blinkered view of what their behavior and territory really is.”

Bruce Finley: 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com