The elusive cougar that officials have been tracking for days, was finally caught at 2 a.m. this morning on the road that leads to the Daybreak Star Cultural Center in Discovery Park.

Get the full story from Magnolia Voice, who reported it first. After sightings all over Magnolia since August 28 (see the sighting map here), officials were able to track down the cougar’s scent with dogs, which chased the cat into a tree before officials sedated it with a tranquilizer gun.

Officials say the animal is doing well, and will be transported to Snohomish County, where he will be released into the wild later this afternoon. He is about 3 years old and weights 138 pounds.

And the question on everybody’s mind, how did the cougar get in Magnolia. Wildlife officer Nicholas Jorg, who captured the cougar, has a theory:

Discovery park will open again today, at 11 a.m. For more information on the capture, see reports on Magnolia Voice.

Here is the text of Wildlife officer Nicholas Jorg’s statement:

You know, a lot of times cats like this, that are good mountain lions, they try to avoid people. So primarily by doing that, they move around at nighttime, and I think maybe in a stormy night a mountain lion could wander around and find out – you know – wake up the next day and he’s in a real urban environment, thinking ‘how the heck did I get here?’ So he might have followed some corridor down, and once you get to a certain point maybe traffic keeps scaring him further and further in the wrong direction, or something along those lines. It’s all kind of guessing and hypothetical at this point, but if he comes back we’ll have a better idea because we’ll have locations on him from the collar. But it’s very unlikely he’d come back. I think it was probably a big accident that he got here in the first place.

When I first saw that mountain lion on the tree, I was – there was still a little bit of astonishment even for me, because I was a little bit of s skeptic still about whether it really existed or not, but when you see that big cat in the tree and you think, ‘wow, I’m in Seattle,’ it was impressive to see that beautiful animal. He’s a real handsome cat; I don’t know if you’ve gotten a chance to see him or not. He’s a real pretty animal. It was nice to see him in there in that he was actually cohabitating with the community so well, really. He didn’t really cause any problems, and he was trying to stay out of sight.