Cougars ( mountain lions)

[Gus9890]

I've seen them here in Florida and I see them a lot up home in Northwest AP. They tend to not bother people on the East Coast because they're not harassed as much as those on the West Coast (from people encroaching on their territory).

[Gus9890]

Correction: PA

[bamboo bob]

I saw a cougar on the PCT. On the trail, actually a side trail going down to Idylwill. Here in Vermont they are called catamounts. Peaple report sightings all the time. I have seen bobcats that are pretty big though. One was the size of a Labrador retriever and actually bigger than the lion I saw in California. So it's not proven that there are resident catamounts in Vermont but it sure seems possible to me.

[aficion]

I saw a cougar on the PCT. On the trail, actually a side trail going down to Idylwill. Here in Vermont they are called catamounts. Peaple report sightings all the time. I have seen bobcats that are pretty big though. One was the size of a Labrador retriever and actually bigger than the lion I saw in California. So it's not proven that there are resident catamounts in Vermont but it sure seems possible to me.

Been known as Painters hereabouts for some time. Seen 2 quite clearly, and what appeared to be tracks of others. Believe they are still around.

[Abatis1948]

I've seen them here in Florida and I see them a lot up home in Northwest AP. They tend to not bother people on the East Coast because they're not harassed as much as those on the West Coast (from people encroaching on their territory).

I have had the wonderful experience of see three of these wonderfulanimals in the wild. In my families backyard (Wadley, Georgia) in 1956, justnorth of Fort Stewart, Georgia, in 1992, and my last was on the FacevilleHighway between Bainbridge, Georgia, and Chattahoochee, Florida, in 1994. We also have bears here in Florida. Have not seen one in my twenty years of living here.

[Gus9890]

I used to see them all the time when I worked Security on Amelia Island (at FL/GA border). Some of the ones I worked with saw deer and bear, other than cougars only thing I ever saw was snakes, coons, armadillos, osprey, and various other birds.

[hoppy from GA]

My grandfather, who passed away at 98 last year, told me that he heard a few scream at night when he was a young man growing up and roaming the woods in N. GA, so that had to be in the 1930's.

[Gus9890]

We rarely see or hear anything of them on the east coast because they're a lot more elusive than their western cousins and you really don't have the encroachment onto their territory as you have out west. They completed research about 6-7 years ago and found that the Eastern Cougar never went extinct, it's just really elusive and stays away from humans as much as possible. I know in PA the Cougar population is healthy, along with other animals due to the reintroduction of a lot of wildlife that was once native to PA.

[canoe]

We rarely see or hear anything of them on the east coast because they're a lot more elusive than their western cousins and you really don't have the encroachment onto their territory as you have out west. They completed research about 6-7 years ago and found that the Eastern Cougar never went extinct, it's just really elusive and stays away from humans as much as possible. I know in PA the Cougar population is healthy, along with other animals due to the reintroduction of a lot of wildlife that was once native to PA.

What study are you quoting about PA????

[Gus9890]

I don't remember who did the study now, the only things I remember about it is that they studied what I mentioned, one of the places where they were at was the Allegheny National Forest in Northwestern PA where I'm from, and that they also went to NY and other places in New England.

[Pedaling Fool]

I've never heard of this study; as far as I know the Cougar population on the east coast is still officially considered extinct, which was officially declared in March 2011. >>> See Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/sc...ugar.html?_r=0

One interesting part of this is that some speculate that there was never a distinct eastern cougar subspecies.


Excerpt from the above link:


"Seven decades after the last reported sighting of the Eastern cougar, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service declared it extinct Wednesday and recommended that it be removed from the nation’s endangered species list.

There’s one wrinkle, though: it may not be extinct, exactly.

Scientists are moving toward the conclusion that the Eastern cougar was erroneously classified as a separate subspecies in the first place. As a result of a genetic study conducted in 2000, most biologists now believe there is no real difference between the Western and Eastern branches of the cougar family."

[GoldenBear]

Nobody would be more deliriously happy to have a breeding colony of cougars in the northeast part of U.S. than this group:
http://www.cougarnet.org/index.html
They WANT to find cougars. They actually LOOK for cougars. They CONFIRM cougar sightings.
But they still conclude it hasn't happened yet.

Here is their map of where cougars have actually been CONFIRMED
http://www.cougarnet.org/totalus.html

Note that they include Connecticut, where a Florida cougar was found to have wandered up to. This is NOT a breeding colony in New England, however; that would REQUIRE (note the words) a MINIMUM (note the words again) of fifty cougars.

Note also that they do not record one single confirmed sighting in Pennsylvania. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nitchs. Niente. Ne rien. ничто.
Here's a report on the entire Middle Atlantic Region:
http://www.cougarnet.org/middleatlantic.html

Remember that a group of fewer than thirty cougars in Florida regularly left (relatively) easy to find evidence of their presence. Unless and until someone can explain how a colony of larger size has escaped all detection for about 80 years, then I will refuse to accept that it has happened. I just don't buy the argument, "You can't prove that cougars AREN'T there, thus they MUST be there."

It IS true that a group of people, with a clear political agenda of creating mistrust of the federal government, have stated for decades that federal wildlife officials released cougars into the wild into order to make it harder for hunters to find deer. However, I also don't buy the argument, "The fact that no evidence exists to support my paranoia is PROOF of a coverup!"

As the above cougar network intelligently points out:

In West Virginia, hunting with dogs is very popular ... every year thousands of hunters using hounds are out in hunting season pursuing bobcats, black bears and other wildlife. This means you would expect these hunters would regularly tree cougars if they were present, but this has not occurred.

Nothing would make me happier than to know that a true breeding colony of cougars is back in the Northeast. I hope to live to see it happen, as it is clear that cougars are moving east from the Rockies. But, as of now, I remain unconvinced that it has happened.

http://www.easterncougar.org/pages/beyondsightings.htm

Are cougars now recovering in the East?
Not yet. Despite more sophisticated technology for finding cougars, and with more people looking than ever before, less evidence has appeared in the last decade than in the 1990s
...
Sanctioned studies since the late 1990s by the ECF, research universities, and state and federal wildlife agencies in NY, NJ, PA, MD, VA, WV, and KY have failed to find evidence of cougars
...
Where cougars are well established, any knowledgeable individual can find evidence in a few days. Yet, our own field searches, sometimes within hours or a day of a sighting, have failed to produce evidence

[Gus9890]

The Fish and Wildlife Service always has also tried saying that they didn't swap out PA Turkey for Montana Coyote, which they did. We've had Cougars up home for decades, you can find them pretty easily in and around the Allegheny National Forest (McKean, Forest, Warren, Elk Counties). The Fish and Wildlife Service didn't reintroduce them but they have reintroduced Elk (not counting the controlled herds), Coyote, Bobcat, American Marten, Fisher, American Mink, Appalachian Cottontail, Snowshoe Hare, Stoat, Least Weasel, and Northern Flying Squirrel all within the last 12-13 years. Word got out that they wanted to reintroduce the Grey Wolf 4 years ago but that didn't go over to well.

[Draggin]

I spotted a cougar in 2009 just south of the cobbles on the A.T. in Cheshire, MA. Every time I tell people this they think I'm nuts but I know what I saw.

[Game Warden]

Speaking only for my small part of Pennsylvania along the AT, there is no PHYSICAL EVIDENCE of cougars here. Yes, I know one was found in Connecticut recently, and other eastern locales, but I have investigated numerous "sightings" of cougars and never found PHYSICAL EVIDENCE to corroborate the "sighting." Although a couple "sightings" were clearly hoaxes, I don't doubt the belief or honesty of most of the people who report a cougar--just that the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE is lacking, despite a forensic approach to the scene.

[Gus9890]

I've never heard of any down in your neck of the woods (I got family and lived in York for a bit), they're mostly in the forests of Northwest PA. Take a trip up there sometime, easiest way to see them is in the fall while spotting deer in the fields.

[FishyOne]

If you don't have a picture, you have nothing!

[Sarcasm the elf]

If you don't have a picture, you have nothing!

The one that was struck and killed twenty minutes from my house was good enough evidence for me.

[Another Kevin]

Cougar can travel a long way - many hundreds of miles, and misplaced ones do turn up in the Northeast fairly often. I think that a sustainable breeding population would be more apparent than it is.

My uncle sighted one in Sullivan County, NY in the 1970s. He told the authorities about it. While he didn't have photos of the creature, he got good pictures and plaster casts of the tracks, and photographed the scat, both with rulers in the camera's field of view. He was informed that what he'd seen was an unusually large lynx (Lynx canadensis), notable in itself because around his place, you typically would only see bobcat (Lynx rufus). But he didn't believe the identification for a moment because he'd seen the long tail held high - which completely rules out either species of Lynx.

A couple of weeks later, he saw a squib in a newspaper about a cougar's having been trapped in Greene County, some distance to the north. The bedraggled creature had been tagged, and was traced back to a wild animal park/zoo in the Poconos. My uncle's place was nearly on a beeline between where the cougar had escaped and where it was finally found, and is quite close to Minisink Ford, one of a handful of places where a cat could have crossed the Delaware River without walking the streets of a town. So he was quite convinced, to his dying day, that he'd spotted Puma concolor. It wasn't a native cougar, but a cougar it was!

Several people that I trust to be astute observers have spotted Puma concolor in the Catskills. But the sightings don't happen often enough, nor are the effects (predation, tracks, scat) seen often enough that I can believe there's a population there sustaining itself. I get pretty far into the hills there. I identify tracks from coyote, bear, bobcat, the occasional lynx (we're outside the normal range but it's known they visit regularly), marten, mink, and so on quite regularly. Never spotted any evidence of Puma. If there were a few dozen pairs back there, all the people who go snowshoeing off trail would surely see more tracks in the snow than they do.

I entirely believe that we get visited regularly by vagrant Puma concolor. I'm still skeptical that we have a native population. I would surely love to be proven wrong!

[Wise Old Owl]

I've seen them here in Florida and I see them a lot up home in Northwest AP. They tend to not bother people on the East Coast because they're not harassed as much as those on the West Coast (from people encroaching on their territory).

Any chance you have seen or heard one in the last ten years? in PA