As they stood looking out over a rise one crisp autumn day in 1987, Leandre Poisson and Howard Mansfield spotted a very large, low-slung, tawny-colored animal walking leisurely across a pasture on Poisson’s property in Harrisville, New Hampshire.
It was so big and moved so distinctively that the two men knew immediately what it was. Poisson dashed inside to get binoculars. The two shared the field glasses as they watched the creature for the next ten minutes. It had the head and body of a maneless lion, and a long, thick tail.
No other native cat has a tail like this. The men knew they were watching a mountain lion, a cougar, a puma, an eastern panther, the largest predator ever to roam the northeastern United States.
What they didn’t realize was this: there weren’t supposed to be any mountain lions left in the northeastern U.S. Yet many times before and after the animal appeared in Poisson’s field, people have reported seeing mountain lions where there weren’t supposed to be any. In Massachusetts, well over two hundred sightings have been filed with fish and game officials in the last ten years. Cougars have been seen in New Jersey. Folks in Pennsylvania say they’ve found cougar kills—deer carcasses covered with sticks and debris.
But no one has taken the photograph, filmed the video, found the carcass or cast the track that proves to everyone’s satisfaction that wild mountain lions are indeed back, living in the most densely populated portion of the United States. Only one instance of these numerous sightings has been accepted by wildlife officials as the real thing: Mark Walker, a Massachusetts resident visiting his mother, saw three mountain lions strolling through the woods together in Vermont’s Green Mountains on April 2, 1994—and his sighting was confirmed by the discovery of mountain lion droppings. The scat was analyzed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s forensic lab in Oregon; it contained hairs the animal had swallowed after grooming itself, which allowed a positive identification. The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department issued a press release citing “hard evidence of cougars in the wild in Vermont.”
But what about these other sightings elsewhere in the East?
How could such a large predator go undetected by wildlife workers for so long? Even out West, where cougar numbers have risen steadily over the past decade, the cats are elusive. There are an estimated 5,000 cougars in California, 2,000 in Idaho, 2,500 in British Columbia and perhaps 700 in Alberta. Susan C. Morse, a forester and wildlife habitat consultant based in Jericho, Vermont, has been visiting lion country in these areas for the past ten years as part of what she calls a “personal quest” to learn more about the animal and its living requirements. It was two years before she saw her first cougar.
Unlike bobcats, cougars are not usually aggressive. Still, the western comeback of such an impressive predator has spawned some controversy and concern. Two joggers have been killed in the past five years by cougars, one in California and one in Colorado. A human running by in front of a young, inexperienced cougar is almost as irresistible as a string wiggling on the floor in front of a kitten. In the state of Washington, a cyclist glanced over his shoulder to see a cougar loping alongside him on a fire road. But once the cyclist wisely halted the bike, the cat lost interest. Cougar experts believe these were all young mountain lions testing new, marginal habitats—since people have left cougars so little room. Howard Quigley, president of the Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute in Moscow, Idaho, notes that dangerous incidents involving lions are rare. During the past hundred years, there have been fewer than sixty documented attacks by cougars on people. Even though these days people are seeing more lions, Quigley points out that mountain lions are able to watch humans a great deal more easily than we can observe them.” So far, they have mostly watched us harmlessly.
Cougars are conservative. creatures. In Alberta, Morse tracked one female who ate from the carcass of a single moose calf for thirteen days. And mountain lions usually shrink from people. In Orange County, California, Morse tracked a tom cougar who used a culvert under an eight-lane highway to get to and from one part of his territory without being seen. Yet, in the East, where Morse has been “tracking all sorts of critters” for more than two decades, she has yet to see even one footprint of a mountain lion. “That doesn’t prove they’re not here, she says. “It only means they’re not where we’re looking for them.”
The quest to find wild cougars in the Northeast has been, in the words of one writer, like chasing a ghost.
Tom French, assistant director for Natural Heritage and Endangered Species programs at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, has had plenty of experience with reports of sightings of unusual creatures. “The mountain lion is definitely the most interesting of the phantoms of the woods that people call in about,” he says.
But unlike other phantoms, the mountain lion is a known species, a creature who used to exist in the Northeast, and who, indeed, belongs right where folks are saying it is.
The mountain lion was once one of the most widespread large mammals in the New World, found from Alaska to South America. In Colonial times, they were so numerous that many areas offered bounties for them. Even zoologists and conservationists urged on the eradication effort: in 1913, the director of the New York Zoological Society told forestry students at Yale that “the eradication of the puma . . . is a task of immediate urgency.” Like so many native mammals, the catamount—as many New England locals once called it—was extinguished by the turn of the century.
Or so people thought. Where, otherwise, could the phantom cougars be coming from?
Undoubtedly, some of the well-meaning folks who reported cougar sightings really saw something else. But most wildlife officials agree that not all these reports are cases of mistaken identity. “I’m not skeptical that lions are here,” says Morse. “I’m skeptical that an indigenous wild population is here generally, throughout, for instance, New England.”
Some of the mountain lions people report seeing could be escaped pets. Strange as it sounds, people do keep them. And as long as they have a permit, it’s legal. In Massachusetts alone, more than fifty people have such permits.
But could escaped pets account for all the evidence? Friends of the Eastern Panther, an alliance of lion fans based in Exeter, New Hampshire, thinks not. The nearest acknowledged populations of mountain lions are in Florida, where an extensive effort is under way to bring the species back from the brink of extinction. Then there’s the population in Montana, and further west. But, Friends maintains, there could be another unacknowledged population as near as New Brunswick in eastern Canada. These forested lands, the alliance believes, could be the “refuge” from which the migrants set out.
A few springs back, Friends of the Eastern Panther mounted a search for signs of mountain lion along the Fundy Bay region of the province. Morse was on that team, along with two biologists and several volunteers. On snowshoes, on snowmobiles, in airplanes, they scoured the land for cougar prints, cougar scat, cougar kills. They found nothing.
But that doesn’t prove the animals are not there. Or in the northeastern U.S.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, has tracked mountain lions in Idaho, held wild mountain lion cubs in her arms, and spent time at close range with a tame mountain lion named Ruby (so close that the adult lioness sucked peacefully on Thomas’s arm). So Thomas knows what she saw, one recent winter, when she looked out the window of her home in southern New England: a tawny cat, bigger than a bobcat, with a tail thick as a child’s arm. And she believes there are plenty more where that one came from.
“Why shouldn’t there be mountain lions?” she asks. “There were no coyotes here thirty years ago—a western animal no one had ever heard of. But they’re here now. Why not mountain lions?”
If the mountain lion—like the eagle and the fisher, the bear and bobcat—is making a return to the Northeast, this is important news. As Donald Schueler writes in his book Incident at Eagle Ranch, “The mountain lion works a strong magic in the imagination of many Americans. It is the ultimate loner, a renegade presence in the wildest canyons and wildest mountains, the sign of everything that is remote from us, everything we have not spoiled.”
If the Northeast’s top predator is back, it’s a sign that the land is recovering from the abuses of a hundred years ago—and a sign of a brief, vital opportunity to protect the wild lands that remain in this crowded, “civilized” corner of the world. “It’s like we have a second chance,” says Morse. “If mountain lions are here, it’s because they deserve to be here.”