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Photo by Leonard
Lee Rue |
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Cougars coming our way
By Fred LeBrun
So you think you’ve seen a cougar slinking
about your backyard or backwoods. Well, welcome to the club. More
and more New Yorkers claim they have. It’s become something
of a cult sighting, like Bigfoot used to be. A week doesn’t
go by without some excited resident of suburbia or the North Country
swearing up and down that he saw a mountain lion for sure.
The number of sightings in the state during
the last few decades has exploded with no sign of abatement: 625
since 1983. In the Adirondacks alone, there were 89 sightings from
1990 to 2000. This mirrors the situation in adjoining states. The
Eastern Cougar Network has come into being to keep track of the
deluge of facts, opinions and anecdotes related to cougar sightings.
Many people, such as naturalist Peter O’Shea near Star Lake,
are certain that several cougars have been prowling around the Adirondacks
in recent years. O’Shea believes a remnant breeding population
has persisted, quietly, throughout the 20th century even though
biologists maintain they’re extinct in New York.
O’Shea cites the staggering number of sightings over the years,
often by veteran trappers and knowledgeable observers such as state
forest rangers and conservation officers. He also says he has seen
cougar tracks six times over the past 25 years—the last time
four years ago in the Five Ponds Wilderness. “They’re
here,” he says. “They’ve always been here. I think
there’s a wide-ranging population, from a dozen to two dozen,
in the Adirondacks and surrounding terrain.”
But skepticism persists among wildlife biologists. “The story
hasn’t changed in over a hundred years. Smoke is still just
smoke,” asserts Al Hicks, a big-game biologist with the state
Department of Environmental Conservation. There’s the gauntlet
thrown down for all of you convinced that mountain lions—or
panthers, cougars, catamounts, painters, pumas, whatever you want
to call them—are out there right now lurking about the Adirondack
backcountry.
Hicks allows that maybe an occasional pet cougar is released or
escapes into the wild, but he and other skeptics argue that if cougars
were breeding in the Adirondacks, we’d have a clear photograph
of one by now. Or somebody, a hiker or a hunter, would have discovered
a carcass in the woods or a deer mauled in the peculiar way puma
devour their prey. Not once has any of the above happened.
On the other hand, how often do you come across the carcass of a
bear or moose in the woods?
But let’s leave that hot debate for the moment. Whether or
not you want to believe that cougars roam our woods today, there
are experts who maintain that it’s only a matter of time before
it is undoubtedly true. Mountain lions are relentlessly repopulating
wild lands across North America, from west to east.
“Absolutely, I am convinced that eventually we will see reproducing
populations of mountain lions in the Eastern states. I’d say
within a couple of decades,” predicts David Baron, author
of The Beast in the Garden. The book chronicles the cougar’s
expansion into Boulder, Colo., where a jogger was stalked and killed
in 1991. Besides relating this grisly death, the book serves as
a terrific reference work about these large cats, fact and fiction.
Baron sees more conflicts on the horizon between humans and cougars
as these top predators expand closer to cities and suburbs.
The big cats are moving east at a pretty good clip, too. A cougar
killed recently by a train in Oklahoma was wearing a radio collar
and had traveled 670 miles from South Dakota. A decade ago, the
cougar frontier was just east of the Rockies, around western Nebraska.
Now there are confirmations in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and even
southern Illinois.
Look at a map. The obstacles to mountain lions migrating to heavily
forested New York are nil, and the attraction mighty: deer. That’s
what cougars love best, breakfast, lunch and dinner. And New York
does have deer—even if whitetails are scarce in the Adirondack
high country.
If cougars were to return, it’s usually assumed that they
would settle in the area around Cranberry Lake, the wildest part
of the Park. A decade ago, however, wildlife biologist Rainer Brocke
of the state College of Environmental Science and Forestry concluded
in a study that even the Cranberry Lake region has too many roads
to suit the cats.
Brocke is sticking to his guns. “As far as I know, that conclusion
is holding up just fine. I’ve seen no reason to change it.
Sightings alone are very unreliable. We still have no real proof
of a breeding population anywhere in the east, except parts of Florida,”
says the emeritus professor. Brocke asserts that if a big cat is
in an area, there are always tracks. After all, these are not mythical,
ghostly creatures. Yet in all the years he traipsed the Adirondacks
studying wildlife, Brocke has never seen a cougar track. Not once.
But it’s hard to read Baron’s book and not wonder if
panthers could live here. Mountain lions are adaptable creatures,
stealthy and elusive. They were living inside the city limits of
Boulder. So they might manage just fine in the vast wilderness of
the northwestern Adirondacks.
For the record, Baron does not believe panthers are living in the
East now, at least not outside Florida. Like Brocke and Hicks, he
points to the lack of physical evidence. How, then, do the skeptics
account for the dramatic rise in the sightings? Brocke discounts
them as false. “If you are determined to see a mountain lion,
you are likely to see one whether it’s there or not,”
he says. “That the way the mind works.”
The Eastern Cougar Network documents
the evidence of cougars in the East and Midwest. For more information,
visit
www.easterncougarnet.org. |
