On February 18, a reader emailed Seven Days an intriguing photo: a cat slinking through snowy woods near Groton State Forest. A pretty large cat.
“I live in Cabot and was driving down my dirt road yesterday when I spotted a juvenile mountain lion in the road,” wrote the sender. “It ran in front of my car for 10 feet … It stopped to look at me, I grabbed my phone and was able to snap a quick picture of it before it bounded off into the woods.”
The reader seemed certain that what she’d seen wasn’t a bobcat or a lynx, but the creature that many Vermonters believe still roams the state: a mountain lion — or catamount, in local parlance.
Has the noble catamount returned to the state that still uses it as a sports mascot? WTF?
Mountain lions are common in the western United States, but both the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service insist that the native Eastern puma is extinct, and may have been since the 1930s. 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.
Yet dozens of Vermonters still claim to glimpse catamounts each year, from the Northeast Kingdom to Bennington County. In January, a New York television station fielded numerous reports of a mountain lion sighting in the Adirondacks.
“We get 50 to 75 [reported] sightings a year,” says Chris Bernier, VFWD’s wildlife biologist for fur-bearing animals and the go-to guy regarding catamounts. When a purported sighting comes in, the staff logs it into their rare-animal-sightings database. Then it falls to Bernier to do the detective work to figure out whether a claim “is the real McCoy,” which might involve sending a biologist to collect tracks, scat or hair.
To dispel the widespread belief that the agency is covering up the presence of catamounts, Bernier says he spends a considerable amount of time following up on sightings — sometimes working from “photos of terrible quality, though your imagination could lead you to believe ‘this is a mountain lion.'”
“I would like people to understand that we do take these [sightings] seriously,” Bernier goes on. “We have a GIS database that allows us to track sightings spatially and temporally, so that if we do get an emerging pattern, at least we should be able to predict, ‘Hey, we might have a mountain lion or two in that area.'”
All leads have run cold, though; many turn out to be “cases of mistaken identity,” says Bernier. For instance, the Canada lynx — an endangered species that seems to be making a comeback in the Northeast Kingdom — is often mistaken for a catamount, although the lynx is much more diminutive.
“If mountain lions [were here], there would simply be more definitive evidence,” Bernier notes, such as tracks, carcasses — via car accidents or hunters — or a definitive image from one of the thousands of game cameras around the state. “Vermont is not that large a state, and it’s not that rural,” he continues. “It’s crisscrossed by roads and human activity everywhere, with the possible exception of the spine of the Green Mountains. So really, a mountain lion existing in the area is just going to show its face if we have a resident population.”
By “resident,” Bernier means “reproducing.” Western mountain lion activity has been documented as close as Québec, and a cougar carcass was discovered on a Connecticut road in 2011, so Bernier says the agency doesn’t rule out the possibility that the cats are passing through Vermont. “We recognize the fact that mountain lions have the potential to occur in the state in a transitory nature,” he says. “The evidence is clear that mountain lions are widely dispersing animals.”
Genetics research determined that the mountain lion found in Connecticut originated in South Dakota — which means it could have passed through Bennington County, observes Bernier.
Despite his skepticism, he says he’s “psyched” by the prospect that a lead might pan out one day. “I would be as excited as anyone to have mountain lions in my backyard,” he says. “I would love to know we live in a wild place. There is some sort of purity to the notion that, if mountain lions can live here, we’re doing something right to manage our habitat. Though maybe that’s my own delusional opinion,” Bernier allows. “Suffice [it] to say, I spend a lot of my time on mountain lions, considering I have 16 other species [to watch].”
The reader also posted her photo to a Facebook page called Vermont Mountain Lion Sightings. Its administrator, Annie Shafiroff, a South Burlington resident and devoted catamount enthusiast, had doubts. “I honestly do not think that this is a mountain lion at all,” she wrote in a comment on the posting. “The shape of the face is that of a bobcat. Maybe it could be a lynx?” Shafiroff added that lynx had been sighted in the vicinity.
Other posts on the page suggest ongoing sightings. In January, one woman wrote that she was “pretty positive” she saw a catamount near Charlotte. “It was huge and had a rabbit in its mouth,” she reported.
Of the photos she’s seen, Shafiroff tells Seven Days, many are “not genuine, because I don’t believe that many people out there can seriously tell the difference between a bobcat, lynx or mountain lion.” At an average weight of 150 pounds, a mountain lion is way larger than the 15-to-35-pound bobcat.
However, Shafiroff isn’t troubled by the lack of a definitive mountain lion picture, “because sightings happen so fast. They happen when we least expect them to occur,” she notes.
As for Bernier, he doesn’t miss a beat when he sees the reader’s photo. “That’s undoubtedly, 100 percent, definitely a bobcat, from its face to its posture to its size,” he remarks. “It’s a bobcat up to its belly, and it has no tail. If it was a catamount’s tail, they’d be holding it up out of the snow.”
And so the search continues.
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Have seen a jet black one, walked right n front of the car. In Shaftsbury. Have photos of tracks anf tail marks in the snow’
One was spotted in Fairfax Vermont on 10/29/2014 my friends neighbor got a nice picture of it.
One was spotted in Fairfax Vermont 3 days ago my friend got a picture of it.
Got a glimpse of one on rte 4 in Rutland this past Friday 10/17/14. We were passing through in a car just onto the highway so there was no time to get a picture. Tan body about 5 feet long with a long tail. ( about 4 ft) did not get a look at the head and face but know what I saw
We saw one in Wilmington while on vacation, in the backyard of our rental house. We were in chimney hill, August 4, 2014.
You need to do more research on catamount sightings: “a mature mountain lion and two cubs apparently were sighted in Craftsbury, Vt., during the winter of 1993-‘94. Their scat contained fur that Fish & Wildlife officials determined, through microscopic analysis, to be that of a catamount.”
Many of us who have seen them on a regular basis prefer to just shut up about it lest the state feel the need to “manage” them as they do with bears (hunted down by packs of dogs while the hunters sit in trucks drinking beer) or deer (any orphaned fawns are shot).
About two thirds of the catamount sightings I know of are melanistic, almost black, the other third being the expected tan.
And of curse, one photo making the rounds claiming to be VT last month turned up, in a Google image search, to have been taken in December somewhere out west. Any photo that originates on Facebook has to be brought into question.
I saw one in a cow pasture, off Rupert Mt. Rd. in Pawlet in the late 80’s.
I have seen 2 in Charlotte in the 15 years I have lived here. Both were brief sightings and were distinguished by their shape and distinctive long swooping tail. I never formally reported them because, in both instances, I was driving and so, of course, could not get photos and knew that I would be dismissed as so many others have. Many, many reliable people have caught brief glimpses of these shy and beautiful creatures. Bobcats are much more common in this area, and their pointy ears and short tail make them quite easy to identify.
We have seen them up.around Standard Mountain and Coles Pond.