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. My own inclination, for the little it matters, is to side with the professionals like Blodgett. There is a lot of good habitat between here and the places where there are established populations of mountain lions, he said. Forty years of reporting on New Hampshire cougar sightings has convinced Harrigan that the state is home to at least a handful of breeding animals. Our hunter friend was hunting in central NH when they came upon an adult deer carcass way up in a tree. He and his clients were 100% sure of what they saw, and its very difficult to imagine any other animal being mistaken for a cougar in this case. When that last catamount was killed by a deer hunter, the state was paying a $20 bounty for pelts or carcasses. Vermont Mountain Lion Sightings. He/she was UNMISTAKEABLY a mountain lion: stretched out straight, long tail straight out behind him, golden/beigey color, and smallish head, little ears. Because they are.. My encounter was in Middlesex, VT along the river road (Route 2) just below I89. There are no breeding cougars in New England and we do not need any. And, furthermore, the animal still had its claws, though those have usually been removed from captive animals. Just like we dont need any slimy humans on earth period. Whatever it was, it was standing motionless and, I thought, looking back at me as intently as I was staring at it. 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. The truth is, I was by this point dubious. To date, Keeping Track has helped conserve 40,000 acres in 12 states and inQuebec. Predator removal was steady and unforgiving from the early 1800s . near Greenfield with an experienced guide that hed worked with several times. One one occasion she had two little ones with her so their den must have been sort of closeby. Could be a deer, but it didnt seem to be tall enough. Their bodies are mainly covered in tawny-beige fur, except for the whitish-gray belly and chest. The key to Morses assertion can be found in the term breeding population. Although the fact that cougars have traveled through New England is irrefutable (a DNA-confirmed roadkill is hard to deny), Morse believes its unlikely that they have settled here and created a self-sustaining population. Having retired from a career at General Dynamics, he devotes many of his waking hours to cougar research, a passion hes cultivated for nearly twodecades. The old logging road was easy enough to navigate and I let my feet follow it while I kept my eyes up and scanning. But my eyes picked up something and I knew, right away, that it was alive. I had seen bear, deer, coyotes, foxes, that one bobcat all the usual suspects. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This setting should only be used on your home or work computer. 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. Check out 4 Seconds Until Impact by Bruce Hemming, or Cat Urbigkits books about predator attacks in unlikely places . Yes, of course they are here, transients. Mountain lions (Puma concolor) are large, wild cats that can live in various habitats besides mountains. In their estimation, the presence of a breeding cougar population in New England would likely stem from our proximity to Canada, where, as they rightly point out, DNA analysis has resulted in 19 positive identifications across Quebec and New Brunswick since 2001 (although some of these were shown to be of South American lineage, suggesting escaped pets). As I turned a corner going north toward Waterbury, I saw the cat come up from the cornfield, saunter across the highway, turn and look in my direction and then amble off into the brush. 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. Mountain lions are large, tan cats. The deer dont eat the exotics, but they eat the competitors. You wouldnt shake hands with a man like that, she said, and though she was smiling I could tell she was serious. Coyotes, for instance, found their way into Vermont with no help. Id splurged on them. Especially by one that he remembers involving a kill site.. Height. I only saw the back side, but he was huge. The last time a mountain lion was captured in New York was in the . My assumption is it was the same animal. So Blodgett brought what he had learned in Wyoming and Arizona back to Vermont with him and began following up on catamount sightings. Not a bobcat 100% mountain lion and anybody that tries to think a bobcat as any resemblance to a mountain lion clearly has no idea about wildlife there are a lot of false reports because of this however they are without a doubt in part of New England and fish and game has as usual covered up despite coming out and following mountain lion tracks in the snow through the woods in Central Mass and finding a deer carcass 20 feet up in a tree and said to the landowner yep you probably have a mountain lion passing through and asked for the homeowner not to speak much about it furthermore DNA confirmation of a horse that was attacked in Petersham Massachusetts in the last several years and also the Quabbin Reservoir DNA were mountain lion without a doubt they are here. It jumped 28 feet across the road. In the first, there are those such as myself, whove maybe heard a few second- or third- or fourth-hand stories as well as official denials from state agencies or professional biologists, and therefore find themselves betwixt and between, neither believing nor disbelieving. I also had a coworker report a similar experience around the same time. The glasses I carried were of good quality with exceptional light-gathering property. I had a pair of good binoculars in my coat pocket. Inslerman said the DEC received about a half-dozen calls reporting sightings of mountain lions last year; two calls this week. The first time was in the yard which was surrounded by woods. When I came out, the cat appeared in front of me coming up a rise (incredibly close to some ski condos). But examination of the carcass raised suspicions. There was never, of course, a photograph. You could have 50. That was plain, right away. I mentioned this to a neighbor who spotted one a few miles away. A few years later, though, the scat was retested with DNA analysis and found to be canid, rather than feline, in origin. Americans called the mountain " Tah-wak-be-dee-ee-wads. In the 37 years Ive been working, things have changed in ways Id never have predicted. When we reached tower, a ranger arrived in a pickup. Geoffrey Norman is a Dorset author and a frequent contributor to Stratton Magazine. Harrigans interest in cougars was sparked in the late 70s, after he took ownership of The Coos County Democrat and began noticing the steady influx of reported sightings. Part of this belief is rooted in his journalistic experience, which across the decades has cultivated his nose for sincerity. Fish and Wildlife Service unofficially declared the Eastern cougar extinct. Green Mountain Lion Corporation, Inc. Business Consulting and Services Williston, Vermont 5,563 followers Boutique management recruiting firm focusing on heavy equipment manufacturing & distribution. A 2,000 Mile Journey The animal that was killed in Connecticut proved that. Green Mountain Lion Corp #256 34 Blair Park Road Ste. Perhaps, then, the ultimate question isnt whether cougars are among us, but rather how we can encourage them to settle here. Perfect conditions, then, for thinking you saw something. At least once a year thered be a story from somewhere, but I only ran the absolute best, he told me. However, when I asked the room of 200 or so people how many believe they had seen a mountain lion/cougar/puma/catamount, hands shot up all around the room about 25% of those present. 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. It continues in Connecticut, where that South Dakota cat was killed in 2011, and in Massachusetts, despite two credible reports in the past quarter century (in one case, DNA-confirmed scat; in the other, verified tracks). Had trouble sleeping last night cause that was to close and I think she may have stalked me from where I was in the woods. My stepfather had been a hunter and was no stranger to seeing animals in the woods and countryside, so when they came up over a knoll in the road and saw a large cat looking at them, he saw the face and thought, bobcatuntil they then saw the rest of the animals body: huge, beautifully tawny colored, and in possession of what my mother described as a very long tail, that was as thick as my wrist. 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 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. vital part of this countries ecosystem. Out & About | Best New England Holiday Events for 2019. Wildlife is unpredictable (and several people go missing in wild areas, parks especially, every year -Probably not because of alien abduction). Also moose. We also had bobcats that we saw quite often but I am positive that these were mountain lions! Threat of Being Attacked on route to stone tower on Quabbin Hill. Besides, Ottmann had revealed that hed been charged by a bear in this same piece of woods, and I felt conflicted about diverting my gaze from the underbrush. Scat, tracks, lays, scratch mounds youll see these things.. Until 2011, that question rested upon a hypothetical. The captive narrative also helped explain why there had been so many sightings reported, including some in Greenwich, among the richest and most domesticated suburbs in America. 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. Morse is a Vermont-based naturalist and the founder of Keeping Track, a nonprofit that trains people in the scientific protocols needed to detect, interpret, record, and monitor wildlife tracks and signs. Kim Royar, a biologist at the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, told me she receives 40 to 50 reports annually, and although she believes that few, if any, are actual cougar sightings, she doesnt dismiss the possibility that someday someone will happen upon the real deal. I lived in great Barrington mass and I took photos of tracks in a field in April of 2009 (and of course lost them). There was one young kid, in his 20s, who had been doing it since he was in high school and he walked and thought like a cat. He is a consummate storyteller, and he wears on his sleeve his affection for the region and the hard-working, commonsense people who inhabit it. Vermont offers plenty of habitat in which mountain lions could thrive. Somebody in the NC Legislature believes, because lions are now protected by law. But there was certainty, or near-certainty, on the part of the witnesses who, it seemed, would swear to having seen a catamount. 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