Big Cats

[Matt]

Sorry, that's just my pet Mittens.
$5 reward for her safe return.

[champy1013]

I guess your pet mittens also eats other cats too

[Brenda]

I love how the DEC still stands firm that all of these sightings have to be former pets. There must have been a lot of people who had cougars for pets. What, they don't cross borders? I wasn't aware that state/country lines were visible to animals.

[chris270]

They would need a passport coming from Canada.....

[Brenda]

That's what my husband said--they'd never make it through security.

[champy1013]

If the DEC admitted they had cougars and wolves in the state, they would then have to spend millions on studies and protection for the animals - money they don't have. So while I do not agree with them (I'm pretty sure there are wild cats and wolves roaming around here from time to time), I can see where they are coming from in their deniability factors

[Brenda]

Yes, I know all too well how short their funds are, having worked as a seasonal for a number of years. I would just feel better if they'd come up with a more believable "canned response" than released pets. We've all pretty much agreed that they're a rare occurrence. Perhaps we'll see some changes in funding after the next election (wishful thinking).

[Matt]

Cougars coming our way

by Fred LeBrun

So you think you’ve seen a cougar slinking about your backyard or backwoods. Well, welcome to the club. More and more New Yorkers claim they have. It’s become something of a cult sighting, like Bigfoot used to be. A week doesn’t go by without some excited resident of suburbia or the North Country swearing up and down that he saw a mountain lion for sure.

The number of sightings in the state during the last few decades has exploded with no sign of abatement: 625 since 1983. In the Adirondacks alone, there were 89 sightings from 1990 to 2000. This mirrors the situation in adjoining states. The Eastern Cougar Network has come into being to keep track of the deluge of facts, opinions and anecdotes related to cougar sightings.

Many people, such as naturalist Peter O’Shea near Star Lake, are certain that several cougars have been prowling around the Adirondacks in recent years. O’Shea believes a remnant breeding population has persisted, quietly, throughout the 20th century even though biologists maintain they’re extinct in New York.

O’Shea cites the staggering number of sightings over the years, often by veteran trappers and knowledgeable observers such as state forest rangers and conservation officers. He also says he has seen cougar tracks six times over the past 25 years—the last time four years ago in the Five Ponds Wilderness. “They’re here,” he says. “They’ve always been here. I think there’s a wide-ranging population, from a dozen to two dozen, in the Adirondacks and surrounding terrain.”

But skepticism persists among wildlife biologists. “The story hasn’t changed in over a hundred years. Smoke is still just smoke,” asserts Al Hicks, a big-game biologist with the state Department of Environmental Conservation. There’s the gauntlet thrown down for all of you convinced that mountain lions—or panthers, cougars, catamounts, painters, pumas, whatever you want to call them—are out there right now lurking about the Adirondack backcountry.

Hicks allows that maybe an occasional pet cougar is released or escapes into the wild, but he and other skeptics argue that if cougars were breeding in the Adirondacks, we’d have a clear photograph of one by now. Or somebody, a hiker or a hunter, would have discovered a carcass in the woods or a deer mauled in the peculiar way puma devour their prey. Not once has any of the above happened.

On the other hand, how often do you come across the carcass of a bear or moose in the woods?

But let’s leave that hot debate for the moment. Whether or not you want to believe that cougars roam our woods today, there are experts who maintain that it’s only a matter of time before it is undoubtedly true. Mountain lions are relentlessly repopulating wild lands across North America, from west to east.

“Absolutely, I am convinced that eventually we will see reproducing populations of mountain lions in the Eastern states. I’d say within a couple of decades,” predicts David Baron, author of The Beast in the Garden. The book chronicles the cougar’s expansion into Boulder, Colo., where a jogger was stalked and killed in 1991. Besides relating this grisly death, the book serves as a terrific reference work about these large cats, fact and fiction.
Baron sees more conflicts on the horizon between humans and cougars as these top predators expand closer to cities and suburbs.

The big cats are moving east at a pretty good clip, too. A cougar killed recently by a train in Oklahoma was wearing a radio collar and had traveled 670 miles from South Dakota. A decade ago, the cougar frontier was just east of the Rockies, around western Nebraska. Now there are confirmations in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and even southern Illinois.

Look at a map. The obstacles to mountain lions migrating to heavily forested New York are nil, and the attraction mighty: deer. That’s what cougars love best, breakfast, lunch and dinner. And New York does have deer—even if whitetails are scarce in the Adirondack high country.

If cougars were to return, it’s usually assumed that they would settle in the area around Cranberry Lake, the wildest part of the Park. A decade ago, however, wildlife biologist Rainer Brocke of the state College of Environmental Science and Forestry concluded in a study that even the Cranberry Lake region has too many roads to suit the cats.

Brocke is sticking to his guns. “As far as I know, that conclusion is holding up just fine. I’ve seen no reason to change it. Sightings alone are very unreliable. We still have no real proof of a breeding population anywhere in the east, except parts of Florida,” says the emeritus professor. Brocke asserts that if a big cat is in an area, there are always tracks. After all, these are not mythical, ghostly creatures. Yet in all the years he traipsed the Adirondacks studying wildlife, Brocke has never seen a cougar track. Not once.

But it’s hard to read Baron’s book and not wonder if panthers could live here. Mountain lions are adaptable creatures, stealthy and elusive. They were living inside the city limits of Boulder. So they might manage just fine in the vast wilderness of the northwestern Adirondacks.

For the record, Baron does not believe panthers are living in the East now, at least not outside Florida. Like Brocke and Hicks, he points to the lack of physical evidence. How, then, do the skeptics account for the dramatic rise in the sightings? Brocke discounts them as false. “If you are determined to see a mountain lion, you are likely to see one whether it’s there or not,” he says. “That the way the mind works.”

The Eastern Cougar Network documents the evidence of cougars in the East and Midwest. For more information, visit
http://www.easterncougarnet.org.

https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/scoop.cougars.htm