by David Flint
Periodically The Eastwick Press receives reports from readers about sightings of mountain lions in the area. Quite a few of these have come from the Berlin-Stephentown area, and it generates a lot of interest as to whether these big cats are making a comeback, just as the coyote, bear, moose and wild turkey have done. This interest brought out a group of 20 people to the Stephentown Library Tuesday evening to hear nature author Robert Tougias discuss the topic and his new book, The Quest For The Eastern Cougar.
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Although the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has just recently officially declared the species extinct, Tougias believes this was done without much scientific research or study. He believes that the research that has been done by groups such as the Cougar Rewilding Foundation and the Cougar Network has not definitively established whether there is a breeding population in the northeastern United States. There is very little photo evidence and Tougias thinks that many of the sightings could be people mistaking a cougar for some other animal such as dogs, coyotes, bobcats, fishers, etc. Acknowledging that these animals look quite different, he points out also that most sightings last but a few seconds. That said, there have been many reliable sightings and confirmed evidence of tracks and scat.
But the debate rages on as to whether this evidence indicates a breeding population or a mix of transient cougars and cougars that have been kept as pets and released. Tougias noted that a lot of the scat evidence that has been DNA-analyzed has been determined to be from North American cougars. This is of interest because most cougars that are kept as pets have been brought up from South America. Some think a few cougars could have been here all along having somehow survived the clearing of the land by hiding out in wetlands and on mountain tops. Tougias thinks this is possible but not likely given that a female cougar with kittens needs to kill a deer about every three days and for a long time the deer were not nearly as plentiful as they are now.
Tougias believes that most of the evidence points to a transient, non-breeding population of cats. Female cougars tend to establish their territory close to where they were born but males tend to range far and wide looking for suitable females. Some of them become permanent transients covering very long distances. In June of last year a cougar was hit and killed by a SUV on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut. DNA analysis has determined that this was the same cat identified by hair samples following a sighting the previous December in the Town of Lake George. Further analysis showed the DNA matched that of a cougar that was previously identified through scat, hair and blood from one site in Minnesota and three sites in Wisconsin in late 2009 and early 2010. U.S. Forest Service scientists believe that the profile of this cat’s DNA is most closely related to a breeding population in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota, some 1,800 miles from the Wilbur Cross Parkway.
One of the sightings in the Eastwick area was reported by Karl Brock of Berlin who was sure he saw a mountain lion some years back on Legion Road, which runs north off of the Plank Road. Brock’s description of the big cat matched that of other sightings around here except for one thing – the cougar that Brock saw was black. Tougias said actually, although there is almost no photo evidence, about 15% of all sightings in the East are of black cougars. Biologists insist that while there are black panthers in South America there is no such thing as a black cougar. Tougias, however, believes that there is no reason why melanism or the black gene could not appear in the cougar population, especially in a situation where scarcity of mates leads to in-breeding.
Tougias thinks the debate should not be whether the cougars are here or not here but rather whether efforts should be made to bring them back. The biggest obstacle would be fear. But wolves were feared and yet have been successfully reintroduced in some places. In fact, he believes it more likely that wolves would be reintroduced in the Northeast before cougars ever would, and it would make sense up north as wolves could keep down the over population of moose whereas cougars would normally not try to take down a bull moose. Cougars could, however, feed on the over abundance of deer that we have. They were here at one time, why not set aside land for wildlife and bring them back? Tougias speculated that maybe so many people are seeing cougars – or think they see them – is because they want to see them, or they want to know that the woodland is healthy enough to support the cougar once again. “Maybe by re-introducing them it would seem as if they never left us,” he concluded.
Much more can be learned about the cougar and the debate about the eastern cougar from Tougias’ book, The Quest For The Eastern Cougar, available at Amazon or directly from Mr. Tougias at rtougias@snet.net.[/private]