The first time was in the yard which was surrounded by woods. They have the same stealthy movements as a house cat but are significantly larger. Maybe, I thought, but the shape seemed wrong. It was his great coolness and daring (either that, or fear) that enabled Crowell to shoot the animal at a distance of one rod only (roughly 16 feet), first hitting it in the leg with his shotgun, then dispatching it with a bullet to the head from a borrowed rifle. Unlike male cougars, the femaleslike this Montana cat with her cubdont tend to strike out for new territory, which makes it unlikely that a breeding population would establish itself far from the cougars current habitatsbut not impossible. His Tail was very long almost touching the ground and as thick as velvet rope. A few years later, though, the scat was retested with DNA analysis and found to be canid, rather than feline, in origin. Its range was once similarly vast; from the high north regions of the Yukon to the Straits of Magellan. [An overabundance of deer] means our forests are getting older and older and not being replaced. He also points to the influx of invasive plant species in New England as evidence of an out-of-control deer population. How did I know? This is part of the cougar business. Harrigan is 72 and lives just outside the northern New Hampshire town of Colebrook; he has a long, craggy face that seems almost to have molded itself after the mountainous landscape of his home state. And thats a surprisingly complex question, because it hinges on numerous factors: policy and politics, culture and conditioning, habitat and, frankly, hubris. People said that the catamountas the animal is called in Vermontwas still around and you heard stories about someone who would swear to having seen one. We met for lunch on a Sunday morning in early March, and it didnt take long for me to understand why Harrigan is such a popular columnist. The tavern was quiet except for some hard-rock music playing on the radio, the murmur of a handful of men at the bar, and us. These were old growth woods and the canopy had kept the ground cover down, so I could see three or four hundred yards ahead of me but not clearly, because of the gloom. As livestock farming came to dominate the landscape, pressure on the big cats slowly mounted on two fronts: The number of farmers wanting them dead was increasing, while the rapid transition from forest to farmland meant their habitat was shrinking. Blodgett did on-site investigations of these, in what became a predictably futile search for the sign he had learned, out west, to look for. Was INCREDIBLE! We think theyre coming in from Canada, Betty told me. Somebody in the NC Legislature believes, because lions are now protected by law. I have no choice but to take this seriously, he told me. Beautiful animal. The scientific name for the catamount is Puma concolor. The debate rages in Maine, where the last confirmed cougar kill occurred in 1938, and in New Hampshire, where the last confirmed kill was in 1885. To Betty and Ottmann, the dominant narrative of the occasional itinerant cougar from the West is not particularly relevant to the facts on the ground. But perhaps an even larger portion is the product of his enduring faith in the men and womanloggers, hunters, trapperswhose vocations and avocations have instilled in them a deep familiarity with wild places and the creatures who inhabit them. You dont even have to go out and look for it.. This was as clear as day had a long tail and long body I was thinking someones pet was on the loose or escaped form a zoo !! Most of those sightings were misidentifications, Doug Blodgett says. We clearly have migratory male cougars coming through. There, too, is Crowells photograph, grainy and old: the hunter leaning against a tree stump, his head propped casually on his left hand, elbow to stump, shotgun cradled in the crook of his right arm. Mountain Lions - Rocky Mountain National Park (U.S. National Park Service) NPS.gov Park Home Learn About the Park Nature Animals Mammals Mountain Lion Mountain Lion Last updated: May 4, 2018 Was this page helpful? Still, there is no saying that it will not happen. There were caribou antlers mounted above the front doors, and the interior walls were covered in row upon row of books; a long table was piled high with still more books in seemingly random arrangements. Indeed! When a cats around, its not hard to find evidence. I had a clear look, through the glasses at a bobcat. Newspaperman John Harrigan has long covered the New England outdoors, including writing the New Hampshire Sunday News column Woods, Water & Wildlife which ran for almost 40 years. If the mountain lion is a certified killer of sheep and, sometimes, cattle, it has also occasionally attacked humans. That animal in Connecticut makes for a pretty fantastic story but it takes more than one dispersing male. Ottmann and I walked farther. So you can imagine there. And yet there I was, on a Saturday in early November, crammed into a booth with Bo Ottmann, 48, and Bill Betty, 72, of Cougars of the Valley, the organization that Ottmann founded in 2007 to gather evidence of and alert the public to the big cats living among us. I live in Hopkinton, NH and saw one coming up from the Contoocook River one misty morning. Looking at the mounted animal, behind the glass, had made me feel kind of well, sad. When we reached tower, a ranger arrived in a pickup. Since then, there have been a handful of confirmed mountain lion sightings in the Northeast, although most have been thought to be escaped captive animals. I was curious enough at the time to do a little research. It looked real promising, Blodgett remembers. The tails gotta be there. The Christian school also dropped out of the state . The last catamount in Vermont is finally, officially, certainly dead. They are much larger than bobcat and lynx, young adults can still have spots too. We told him what we saw, and he confirmed other sightings on the property. Given the long, shared border between these provinces and New England, along with plentiful evidence that other species cross this border regularly, it seems entirely possible that cougars would also engage in international travel. The mountain lion can weigh upwards of 200 pounds and it can move like well, like a cat. Responding to complaints about a predator eating a local farmers sheep, Crowell and a small group of fellow hunters had tracked the big cat through the snow. Nostalgia for the Wild The guide told him earlier in the summer he and a couple clients had watched a moutain lion come down to the bank of the Deerfield River just upstream and take a small deer, fawn, drag it into the woods and it kill it, they could hear the screams of the deer as the cougar finished the job. The animal, I learned, is called many things: mountain lion, panther, catamount, puma, cougar and more. The truth is, I was by this point dubious. The regions top predator, the coyote, is classified by biologists as a mesopredator (a type that in New England includes skunks and raccoons), which feeds primarily on smaller animals. A 140-pound male mountain lion was hit by a car and killed in 2011 in Milford, Connecticut. Several years ago, I saw what was definitely a cougar walking along a street. All with eyes to see and spring loaded to see something. There was, in California last year, a case of a mountain lion seriously injuring a six-year old who was walking a trail in Silicon Valley country. Nowhere in New England is the matter definitively settled. My encounter was in Middlesex, VT along the river road (Route 2) just below I89. The animal was too small and it lacked the long, sinuous tail of the catamount. And there have been fatal attacks. The one thing that jumped out at her the tail. Then saw him a few more times from further away across the road and along the edge sometimes of the woods. Interesting article, but it is really incomplete without a discussion of the legal implications of having a confirmed endangered species such as the Eastern Cougar in New England. Then, follow-up DNA researchmatching samples from the carcass with those from scat and hair collected in other locationsestablished that the animal had come to Connecticut from the Black Hills of North Dakota. A far less likelyenvironment for finding a mountain lion than just about anywhere in Vermont. In 1994, scat collected after a sighting in Craftsbury, Vermont, was found to contain cougar hair (the animals are prone to ingesting their hair while grooming), and the commissioner of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department circulated a memo with the following line: Harrigans interest in cougars was sparked in the late 70s, after he took ownership of, Perhaps, then, the ultimate question isnt whether cougars are among us, but rather how we can encourage them to settle here, After 20 minutes or so, we turned and stumbled our way back to the parking lot. I was just amazed as I watched this scene in my own back yard. There was never, of course, a photograph. There are so many great sites out there devoted to. In 2011, the U.S. In my case, I had seen just about everything else in the Vermont woods in the several years that I had been going out, and not just during deer season. o" which translates to " the mountain like a seat." Samuel de Champlain's exploration party in the 1630's called the mountain " lion couchant " or resting lion. He didn't want to dispute what people are saying they saw, he simply says they need proof to substantiate it. Out & About | Best New England Holiday Events for 2019. Honestly, leaving this out of your article would seem to perpetuate the notion that there is a conspiracy to keep us all in ignorance. About six years ago, my mother and step-father were traveling some back roads down to New Boston, NH to visit my sister where she lived in an extended care facility. Whenever I drive up and through my home state of Vermont, I look into the hills that surround me that have no sign of development for miles and miles. New in PJ Media: The world having gone absolutely insane, the Mid Vermont Christian School (MVCS) girls' basketball team is likely to get a lot of heat for this, but in a sane world, they would be the heroes of the story. She lives near the end of a gravel road in a modest, low-slung house tucked into the flanks of the Green Mountains. Tom Stearns, a Vermont Game Warden says they get reports all the time. But the landowners were excited enough by the possibility that, persuaded by Blodgett, they bought a trail camera and set it up on the site. The last catamount killed in Vermont stands under glass just inside the doors to the Vermont Historical Museum in Montpelier, a hop, skip, and a jump down the block from the statehouse. Coyotes, for instance, found their way into Vermont with no help. The police and everyone else just shook their heads but she to her dying breath said she saw a mountain lion in Lexington MA. He set down his cigarette and looked me in the eye. If someone described seeing a black panther, for example, then you knew right away and you didnt need to do any more investigating.. The deer dont eat the exotics, but they eat the competitors. It has, in fact, more names than any animal in the world. We strolled across the tavern parking lot and ducked into the forest, where Ottmann maintains a portion of his $15,000 worth of wildlife recording equipment (hes had no luck capturing a cougar on camera, though, despite more than a decade of trying). In recent years, it has been expanding its range elsewhere; moving into mid-western states like Illinois and Missouri from its established range in the Rocky Mountain states and the Dakotas. And the clincher, What would you say was the most distinguishing feature? I reported it to Connecticut DEEP, only to be told there are no cougars in Connecticut. I saw one about 10 years ago, on our road. The mountain lionalso known as the cougar, puma, panther, or catamountis a large cat species native to the Americas. With all the thousands of trail cameras in the woods of New England, one would think that there would be at least one picture taken of a catamount. Because while male cougars eventually strike out on their own and occasionally wander far from home, females are, as Morse puts it, hardwired to remain close to their mothers home range. The tail, I said. But some sightings were more promising and some seemed exceedingly so. I was agnostic, I suppose, on these stories which the state wildlife biologists inevitably found impossible to substantiate and, often, easy to disprove. And, in the real world, a black bears fatal attack on a hiker in New Jersey last year made many people reconsider their warm feelings for that animal. When that last catamount was killed by a deer hunter, the state was paying a $20 bounty for pelts or carcasses. He says that if mountain lions do . I live in New Milford and I saw one crossing the road in front of me when I stopped to get my mail from my mailbox. Maybe you've seen the UVM(University of Vermont) catamount at a basketball game, or the catamount at the Vermont History Museum. Stratton Magazine Celebrating Manchester and the Mountains. The reasons for this conspiracy vary depending upon whom you talk to, but they coalesce around the idea that wildlife agencies would be inconvenienced by the cougars presence, as theyd be forced to respond in ways that would tax their resources. And, furthermore, the animal still had its claws, though those have usually been removed from captive animals. My parents friend in Deposit, NY, posted a young catamount sitting on the front porch on Facebook. My own inclination, for the little it matters, is to side with the professionals like Blodgett. Bernier gets more than 50 reports of mountain lions a year. Refuge volunteer Dale Erz originally. Matthew Johnson/Vermont Historical Society. There is a reason that millions of people were afraid to go in the water after they saw the movie Jaws. It was his great coolness and daring (either that, or fear) that enabled Crowell to shoot the animal at a distance of one rod only (roughly 16 feet), first hitting it in the leg with his shotgun, then dispatching it with a bullet to the head from a borrowed rifle. I have not had the pleasure of seeing one, but have heard credible reports of them in Western Mass. Although the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the . They set the stage for the exotics to move in, and this has a huge impact on our ecology, he said. It had traveled, certainly, though Minnesota and Wisconsin and, who knows, perhaps even Vermont and might, then, have accounted for some of those sightings. An expert said it was probably a basking shark. A deer is a wild animal and it is always a pleasure to see oneunless it is in the high beams, at night. We were talking about those animals, like coyotes and turkeys, that have re-established themselves in Vermont and, unlike the rattlers, are thriving. A journey of nearly 2,000 miles. There were pine cones on window sills, a well-used hatchet and a variety of animal figurines on display, and, near the television, a stack of videos including Life of a Predator and The African Lion. Videos - Industry Stories; Find Candidates; Much as I liked Ottmann and Betty, and much as I found some of their evidence compelling, I was struggling to reconcile their more provocative claims with the restraint expressed by the many other experts Id spoken with. In the United States the animal could, at one time, be found in all the states but with civilization, came a decline, the Vermont experience being more or less typical. When he suggested we retrace our route, past lion, to see a sow bear with cubs, we headed in the opposite direction. "The catamount, which is also a mountain lion, a cougar, a panther and a ton of other words, is actually one of the most widely distributed mammals in the whole world. On the other side, there are those (as represented here by Bill Betty and Bo Ottmann, along with a number of others I spoke with) who say the overwhelming quantity of anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. They are here in the Catskill Mountains, so named for the magnificent felines. The light was failing and I was on my way out of the woods. No way to proveor disproveit. The cougar and the states refusal to admit it was here made the local paper. Because they are.. In fact, jaguars used to be native to south Texas, as well! Also moose. I thought about why this might be and the best I could come up with for an answer is that we feel a kind of nostalgia for the wild. I noticed that there were many great websites, blogs, and discussion boards devoted to mountain lion sightings in other states of New England, but not one just for Vermont. This was, after all, a long, long way from the nearest known population of mountain lions and virtually the heart of the suburban East. Low 24F. I was tracking some deer tracks and I came to a promising deer run with a lot of deer scat on the ground when I noticed a cat track amongst the sign. [Betty] and the other guys dont do this shit. Still, Spatz acknowledged that the word hope is very different from the word believe. Theymay not be looking, specifically, for a catamount. Instead, the responsne I heard were nonchalant, Oh, yes, lots of people have seen that mountain lion around here; pretty isnt it?. But they would certainly pay attention if they did see one. Adult males may be more than 8 feet long (from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail), and can weigh between 130 and 150 pounds. Im gonna get hammered for it, he sighed. She favors plaid shirts, green Dickies work pants, and hiking boots, and she chided me for shaking her hand too gently. This Everglades panther population has recently recovered after wildlife biologists brought in some animals from Texas to breed with the last few native cats and this story is typical of the conservation ethic that has taken hold in the United States. In Vermont, the last known mountain lion was shot near Barnard in 1881, ending an era when the predators were such a nuisance that the state offered a $20 bounty per pelt. The catamount is a creature of stealth and concealment; it stalks its prey, which on the EasternSeaboard would likely be deer, moose, porcupines, beavers, and domestic livestock. People in Colorado communities might need to warn their children and to look over their own shoulders when they were out jogging, but not here. A hard-to-spot mountain lion patiently waits for the right moment to attack an elk feeding in a gully at the Rio Mora National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico in a photo posted by the refuge . They are there and thriving!!!! 3 talking about this. Perhaps, then, the ultimate question isnt whether cougars are among us, but rather how we can encourage them to settle here. There was one photographed on a porch in Greenwich, CT, looking in the patio window that made national news a decade ago. I started this blog for people to discuss mountain lion sightings and reports in the Green Mountain State of Vermont. I kept trying to make it be something else because I was shocked that I was, indeed, watching a mountain lion pass in front of me. Part of this belief is rooted in his journalistic experience, which across the decades has cultivated his nose for sincerity. There was no mistake. Long Trail Mountain Lion roster: Myra Aldanondo, Olivia Cole-Bugay, Liz Daara, Rose Johnson, Aubrey Lanning, Molly Luikart, Camilla Marcy, Meara Morgan, Harlow Quail, . COLCHESTER, Vt. Catamounts are. Respect predators, protect them but dont worship or try to hug them! My husband and where riding our Motorcycle down Rte 110 near Milan NH People could have been looking at a catamount that was not, in fact, a wild animal. If its not, you just thank the person and say good-bye.. Vermont-based naturalist SueMorse has spent decades studying, tracking, andphotographing cougars outwest. There are many officials in denial up here, but we know what we saw and there are too many sightings by the local folks to be ignored. It was a striking animal, certainly, but it was no mountain lion. We got a picture of our culprit, he says, that very first night.. So I asked him about the catamount and if the animal in Connecticut was some sort of advance scout for a coming wave of resident lions. Westford, MA, crossing Dunstable Rd from Long Sought For Pond into the woods. At least once a year thered be a story from somewhere, but I only ran the absolute best, he told me. We hadnt seen a cougar, nor any evidence to suggest a cougar had traveled these woods recently. Even though the experts say there arent any mountain lions in CT, there are. So Blodgett brought what he had learned in Wyoming and Arizona back to Vermont with him and began following up on catamount sightings. It seems humans just cant resist destroying these animals and either dont realize or dont care what damage we have done to our natural environment over the centuries. He never found the evidence. These things happen suddenly and they are over quickly. Its OK, he told me. Growing up in northern Vermont, Id heard stories of sightings, though always a few steps removed from the tellersomebodys cousin had seen a cougar cross the road on their way home from deer camp up in Canaan (or was it Coventry? Indeed, in 2011, a male cougar was hit and killed by a car in Milford, Connecticut; through its DNA, wildlife biologists were able to trace the cat back to South Dakotas Black Hills, some 2,000 miles distant. These settlers established measures for predator control by any means possible. Feb 28, 2023 4:00 am By Robert Spencer 1 Comment. One day I most certainly watched him/her being chased up and down our chain link fence by a neighbors large dog who was barking insanely and couldnt quite catch the cougar, who finally made it away from the fence to escape the determined dog whod had him trapped up against it. Thats a reasonable assertion. Some might mistake the bobcat, which still lives in New England, for a cougareven though its tail is about 6 inches long andthe bigger cats is 3 feet or more. One wonders just how tolerant Vermonters would be of a healthy population of mountain lions after one attacked a child waiting for the school bus. 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