My husband also saw him, he was something to see, since then we’ve only seen the momma fox and 2 babies, I’m hoping he didn’t get the other 2 babies. My neighbor thought he saw a mountain lion last winter he took a picture of the print as well. We live in northeastern PA in Honesdale there as been a lot of building going on in last 2 years I’m sure the food source is becoming a problem for him. I will continue to look for him & needless to say I don’t go outside without my camera. Since then I stay a little closer to the house with the dog at dawn & dusk, I wouldn’t want to take any chances.

An adult black panther was seen in southern Bedford Co on Devilbliss Rd, Nov. 21st at 0715 hours by an Army captain just back from Iraqi. He shot a cougar in Colorado in 1999 & knows what they and black cougars look like.

Southern Bedford Co. has verified reports of large BLACK panthers/pumas since 1920s based on multiple families in Allegheny Co, Md & southern Bedford Co who owned 1,000s of acres on Wills & Martin Mountains. In late 1980s, a BLACK panther paid visits to Chaneysville Cove School grounds, witnessed by law enforcement, 6 teachers & 30 students, who have never forgotten those events. YES, there are wild native cougars, mountain lions in several regions of the Keystone State.

Documentation exists of native cougars in Pennsylvania, which PGC refuses to acknowledge.

As for PA, let’s not forget the multiple Mountain Lion sightings in Philadelphia in January of 1995.

First, over half of the state is covered in forest lands. Some of these areas were still “fly in hunting” hotspots like we see in Maine or Canada until relatively recent years. There exists ample habitat for a large predator species, as well as game animals that they must subsist upon. People who have never seen PA have the idea that it is all a giant, highly developed “suburbia-land” when in truth it has vast areas of highly UN-developed lands, which are home to good populations of wild animals. (Why else would there be over one million deer hunters there every year?)

Second, the idea that PA has no legends of mystery animals is utterly false. Long before I had ever heard of “Bigfoot” or knew what the term meant, local people knew of (and talked about quietly) what we would today describe as “bigfoot” in NE PA, and south of there was an even stranger type of man-creature called “applesnitches” or “appletwitches” – a type of bigfoot that stood four feet tall and habitually raided old apple orchards. There are reports of encounters with huge bigfoot and the appletwitches in old newspapers, one of which is online (from Susquehanna county) somewhere. Reports of sightings of ‘thunderbirds’ in PA are quite numerous as well. From the colonial period and early northwest, there were tales of encounters with huge maned lions, the last pair being killed in a cave in SE PA in the early 1800s. In my childhood, when I first started trapping there was also what were locally believed to be a subspecies of beaver that we trapped, called “bank beaver” which were NOT muskrats nor young ordinary beavers, but a smaller species that was less than half the size of adult beavers and which never built dams. The teeth of these smaller beaver showed them to be NOT just immature ordinary beavers but mature animals. There were also “brush wolves” seen by many hunters, which some have proposed are coyotes but having seen (one) and examined the skins personally I cannot agree that these canids were coyotes but gray wolves. I also personally witnessed three unknown creatures in a field one night, which to this day I have no idea what they were. In fact there are so many different legends that I cannot hope to list them all here.

Then we come to the “legends” of mountain lions persisting in PA. I have not ever seen one there personally, but have seen tracks (they are not difficult to discern in snow) that could not have been bobcats (far too large) but were large felines. I don’t know if anyone remembers it but there was a ‘flap’ of sightings of what was called the “Nicholson Tiger” in and around the small town of Nicholson near where I formerly lived. This cat was even caught by the local (Scranton) television crews on camera, when their station helicopter spotted it crossing a field behind West Nicholson. Of course the talk on TV news (local) was that the animal was someone’s escaped pet ‘tiger’ (even though no one said it was striped) however I met and talked with one of the first persons to report sighting the animal, and he told me that what he saw was a big, tawny cat quietly stride across US route 92 in the early morning. He was so shocked that he reported it, and of course the news personnel picked up the word “tawny” which they equated to “tawny = tiger” and it became a Tiger, when it was never a tiger but a large mountain lion. Outside of the “official” records, I know of a mountain lion killed in Noxen at the local tannery in the early 1960s, one struck by a train a few years ago in western PA, one photographed on a porch of a house in Bradford county (a young one, not full grown) and of an incident where a mountain lion leaped onto a car, leaving scratch marks that were un-deniable. I personally hunted every year from the age of 12 on, and am convinced those mountains and ridges of NE and North Central PA have a small population of Felix Concolor that never was eliminated. Black cougars seem to be fairly common among the reports too.

I now wish that I had collected all of the articles and reports that I have heard and seen over the years, including several incidents of mountain lions attacking livestock (even a horse killed in NE PA once, a vet examined the horse and stated it had been killed by a mountain lion) which could now be presented. The fact that over a million hunters go into the field there every deer hunting season does NOT “prove” that unknown animals cannot exist there, in fact it is from hunters that many of the reports come!

If mountain lions were extirpated from PA as the official line goes, we should not have had reports of sightings and encounters that continue from the date of the last “official” kills to today. I don’t think it is possible to discern whether the eastern puma is different from the western puma, however we know that a small population of Florida pumas survived to now, and PA has a large region (again NE and NC) which could readily have served as a refuge for a remnant population. If they were exterminated, it is also possible that wild cougars from Canada or New England could have spread into PA; as we see the moose population spreading southwards today. Of course the skeptics say that any cougar found in PA or anywhere in the east (they are also spotted in New Jersey) MUST be an escaped “pet” – so we cannot prove these are a surviving population. However common sense will tell you that not only is it possible the cougars reported today are a surviving population, it is logical.

Is it possible they were from a feral escapee? Yes, but whose to say? Cougars have been spotted in almost every state and province east of the Mississippi. In my opinion they do roam PA and KY, IN, OH, MO and MI. They have been spotted in Ontario and are living in Quebec, so New England is just as likely to have them as does the Appalachia and Smoky Mountain ranges. The main question in my mind – are they descended from Western cougars or reminant stock of Eastern panthers?