Mountain Lion Sighting: Case of Mistaken Identity?

For the second day in a row, residents of Cowan Heights reported seeing an animal resembling a mountain lion, but searchers found only a blond Labrador retriever, animal control officials said Wednesday.

“At a distance, if someone was really anxious enough, they might have mistaken it for a mountain lion,” said Len Liberio, director of Orange County Animal Control.

The animal was spotted about 7:05 a.m. near a horse trail at Travertine Place and Grove Oak Drive in a rural neighborhood east of Orange. A search team scoured the hillside area Wednesday for about two hours and found no cougar tracks, Liberio said.

Tuesday morning, residents had reported seeing a lion at the same spot, and searchers later reported finding tracks. But that report also might have been a false alarm, said Joe Oliver, chief of field services for animal control.

“Sheriffs thought they were mountain lion tracks. My people didn’t,” Oliver said. The tracks found Tuesday were those of a bobcat, he said.

Reports of lion sightings have increased in Orange County since attacks on a 6-year-old Huntington Beach boy last month and a 5-year-old El Toro girl in March.

“It’s like UFOs--you can have a whole bunch of sightings after this much publicity,” Liberio said. “But I don’t want to write it off that easily. It could be that we have more eyes out there looking, and a mountain lion was actually sighted.

“Because there’s two sightings back to back, we’re treating it as an actual sighting.”