Cougar Sightings on the East Coast Suggest a Comeback Is in the Works : Virginia: Botanist says he knows that the animal he saw in Shenandoah National Park has ‘the same air about it as the Loch Ness monster.’ Nonetheless, he has faith.

Randy Winstead lives in the land of the real. He’s a botanist, with a scientist’s respect for facts. He’s a husband and father, 39 years old, who holds two steady hands on the wheel when he drives.

He knows that the animal he saw in Shenandoah National Park not long ago has “the same air about it as the Loch Ness monster.” But he is certain it was a beast that officially does not exist here: a cougar.

On the East Coast, cougars supposedly were exterminated a century ago by farmers and bounty hunters, except for a few in Florida. Reported sightings of the secretive cats never died, though--and recently have been surging.

Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia wildlife officials don’t dispute that some people have seen the sleek, tawny creatures that purr like a tabby, weigh 200 pounds or more full-grown and can kill prey several times their size.

The government’s view, however, is that these animals probably are Western cougars once kept as pets and that they won’t last in the wild. But cougar support groups insist the cats are remnants of a native Eastern population that never disappeared. Eastern and Western cougars, variously called mountain lions, panthers, pumas, catamounts or painters, look like identical twins.

Winstead, the botanist at Shenandoah, had his vision May 13, while driving north on Skyline Drive in the southern section of the Blue Ridge park. One hundred yards ahead, in the late afternoon light, an animal walked along the right shoulder.

Bobcat? Fox? Coyote? Wild dog? He flashed through the possibilities as the creature turned and bolted toward him, then swerved sideways into a storm drain. Winstead said he got a good view of its profile from 30 or 40 yards:

Long body, not squarish like a bobcat. Too graceful to be a dog. A thick tail that nearly scraped the ground. The color of a grown deer. In fact, it looked just like the cougars raised by someone he knew when he was growing up in Mississippi.

“There’s a mountain lion coming right at me,” he recalls realizing, “which is not something many people get to say.”

The animal vanished quickly, and it left no tracks. Some colleagues laughed when Winstead made his report, but not all.

“I do believe the animals are out there,” said Jim Atkinson, Shenandoah’s wildlife biologist. “I believe they are seeing mountain lions in this park.”

Atkinson knows of at least a dozen sightings in his two years at the park, some more believable than others. There have been at least four sightings in Shenandoah park this summer.

Virginia officials say they get a call a week about a cougar sighting, some from trained observers such as scientists and hunters. Maryland officials say they follow up on a half-dozen credible calls a year in the western mountains. West Virginia wildlife biologists also hear regular reports, some from the Canaan Valley vacation area.

It’s the same farther up the East Coast and into Canada. Sometimes there are grainy photographs, scat samples or plaster casts of tracks. Private groups have sprung up to support the existence of the cougars by tracking sightings.

Even famed animal-watcher Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in her new book “The Tribe of Tiger,” said she saw one in her own field in New Hampshire two years ago.

Shenandoah’s log books record sightings dating back several decades:

* “About the size of a Labrador retriever.”

* “Long tail--not a bobcat.”

* “Sounded like a crying baby. Frightened it away with a flashlight.”

Wildlife officials doubt there is a population out there big enough to breed and, thus, re-establish itself.

“What really confounds me is the fact that we have not had animals turn up in road kills, or traps, or treed by houndsmen--in essence having an animal in hand,” said John Organ, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who tracks endangered species from Maine to Virginia. “Until then, we have to be somewhat skeptical.”

Cougars once lived ocean to ocean, from southern Canada to the tip of South America; no mammal had a wider range in the Western Hemisphere. In the United States they now thrive only in the West.

But as they seemingly expand their range, tragic confrontations with humans become more common. In April a cougar killed a jogger in Northern California. A rabid cougar bit off a man’s thumb in Northern California earlier in the summer, before his wife killed it with a knife.

That is one reason why wildlife officials have mixed feelings about the cougar’s possible resurgence; another is the possibility of cattle kills. Still, they say, a cougar tribe would be an ideal solution to the East Coast’s overflowing deer population.