Growing up in New Brunswick, I’ve heard allot of stories of Black Panthers being spotted. When I was young, we used to hear them call at night near a lake that we were down the road from. A friend of the family saw one in his yard at least once.

My father heard them screaming where the Dungarven Whooper is supposed to be. He saw one jump in front of him while driving once as well. It landed in the middle of the road, looked at his vehicle coming towards him, and then lept out of sight to the other side of the road.

My great grandparents used to see them playing in a field near where they had a hunting lodge. They were quite far off in the field, but they said they were sure that they were what they said. My great grandparents spent most of their years in the bush, hunting and fishing. My great grandfather has passed, but I should ask my great grandmother if she has any other stories about them. She still lives in the bush by herself in the same hunting lodge… she even has email now. Not bad for 92 years old .

I had a sighting in the summer of 2005 on a unit of the Big Muddy Wildlife Refuge. I had two witnesses present. The tan colored animal was 100+ yards away walking down a gravel road with its back to us. It had what appeared to be a turkey in its mouth, making it difficult to really see the head. It turned, lept off the road with the turkey still in its mouth, cleared a drainage ditch filled with water and the last thing I saw was a long tail sailing into the timber. The sighting lasted about 5 or 6 seconds. We spent a half hour looking for physical evidence but couldn’t find any other than a few loose feathers. It was extremely dry and of course it hadn’t stepped near the mud in the ditch.

We reported the sighting to the refuge manager and our local agent and were taken seriously. I wish the sighting had lasted a few seconds longer or that we could have been a bit closer or had binoculars, just so I could be 110% certain of what I saw. But when we replay this event in our minds, by process of elimination the behavior and details we did catch just doesn’t correspond with bobcats, coyotes or foxes or large dogs. Since we work for state parks, we see those critters frequently in the course of our routine work. I know other park employees have had good sightings, especially in the Ozarks parks. But big cats by nature rarely leave good physical evidence of their passing.

Mingo was where the last verified cougar in the state was shot in 1927. Then in 1994, an adult female was shot by hunters in Carter County - it cost them $2,000 each. then in 1996 adult cougars were videotaped in Christian County and one in Reynolds County over a deer kill. Then in 2002 we had our first road kill and it was definitely wild in origin.

It seems likely that many of the current reports are of young adults migrating from the west, looking to establish new territory. Some possible are released/escaped captives but like all cats, they can quickly return to nature, especially if they still have their claws and teeth. The real question now isn’t so much are they are here, it’s are they reproducing here?

You might be interested in checking out the Cougar Network to see about recent sightings. By the way, Maine, Quebec and New Brunswick all have had verified sightings in the past few years.

http://easterncougarnet.org/index.html

I was walking down the trail toward the boardwalk and came to bend in the trail. As I came around a left hand bend there was a rock ledge at approximately head level to me. Laying on the ledge was a cougar. We were staring each other in the eyes so I backed around the corner quick! After I backed off the cougar walked off in plain view to me and my friend that was hiking with me.

As we were leaving I told a Ranger about our sighting. He was adimant that we saw a Bobcat and that there are no cougars in Southern Missouri. I tried to explain that the cat had a long tail, tawny in color, about 7 foot in length, and guessing about 130 lbs., but he wouldn’t listen to me. He would believe nothing except that I was mistaking a Bobcat and that there are no cougars in the area. If I ever see a Bobcat that large I’m going to expect to see saber teeth in it’s mouth! LOL I was less than 3 feet from the cat when I rounded the corner there were no ear tuffs, no spots on it’s coat, and no long hairs on it’s cheecks. So it couldn’t of been a Bobcat!

I wouldn’t have minded the Ranger being cautious about a cougar sighting and wanting to verify it. This Wildlife Management Officer just treated me like I was an idiot that couldn’t tell a 20 lbs. Bobacat from a 130 lbs. Cougar! He never even wrote anything down. Just told us we were wrong and dismissed us out of hand.

If there are 9 confirmed Cougars in Missouri how many are off living in the Mark Twain National Forrest? MTNF takes up a huge chunk of the state. Southern Missouri is perfect habitat for cougars with it’s mountainous forrests and large deer herds. Cougars don’t like people and can live most if not all of their lives without ever being seen by a human.

In Missouri, we are taking sightings seriously and to date there have been nine cats confirmed. The escaped pet theory has been discredited in several cases where DNA testing was done or a carcass was examined for stomach contents. Standards are pretty rigorous for “proof” of a cougar sighting but that is as it should be. People who are not skilled outdoorsman frequently misidentify what they look at. Even skilled people can make mistakes depending on conditions at the time of a sighting. Distance, lighting and length of sighting can all play a role and even in the best of circumstances, cats often don’t leave signs of their passing. I speak from personal and professional experience here.

Cougars have received protection and proper management in much of their range for the past 35 years. Conservation efforts have led to the reforestation of much of the cougars former habitat and their primary prey, deer are now abundant everywhere, even the suburbs. It is only natural that as cougar numbers expand, their range will expand and we will likely see recolonization of areas where they have been extirpated for 100 years or more. Ear tagged male cougars have been known to travel over 600 miles in a nearly straight line. Another decade or two should tell us how successful recolonization of the east will be.

The article’s assertions about big cats moving through our area doesn’t seem out of place to me at all, they’ve probably been doing it for a very long time. One of my friends who is a lifelong resident of Windsor, Ontario (South Detroit, to you Americans) has often told me of how in that city every couple years “something big” comes into the city and literally decimates the local cat and dog populations under the cover of night. The general assumption long being that it’s a cougar.