‘Cougars’ in town may be just big cats

Like some other residents of this small town, Mary Elizabeth Goodwyn doesn’t go outside after dark much anymore.

Goodwyn, 81, used to welcome the dusk under a red maple tree in her frontyard every evening, but that was before cougars started showing up in Blackstone -- or at least in Blackstone’s newspaper.

Since 2003, the Courier-Record has published at least 15 articles on cougar sightings in town and in the neighboring 41,000-acre Army National Guard training base.

Wildlife officials say that except for a known population of 100 in Florida, the large cats -- also called mountain lions, pumas, panthers and the fitting “ghost cats” -- were wiped out in the eastern United States by 1900. They say claims of sightings most likely are cases of mistaken identity -- perhaps a bobcat, deer or even a Labrador retriever.

“The sense I get is there are a number of game commission people laughing, and that bothers me a bit because we’ve got good people here who aren’t crazy,” said Billy Coleburn, editor of the Courier-Record, who wrote most of the stories.

As mayor of the town of 3,700, he must also figure out a way to calm residents’ fears.

Although hundreds of cougar sightings are reported each year from Maine to the Carolinas, evidence of their presence is as elusive as the big cats themselves.

Since 1900, only 64 sightings have been confirmed in the East outside of Florida, despite tens of thousands of reports, said Mark McCollough, an endangered species biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is leading a review of the eastern cougar.

“People see an animal run quickly across the road in front of them at night in their headlights, and they might jump to the conclusion it’s a cougar, but a number of those reports are inaccurate,” McCollough said.

Mark Dowling, co-founder of the Cougar Network, a research organization, calls it “mountain lion mania” when one sighting spawns others.

It is easy to misjudge an animal’s size from a distance, Dowling said. His organization often gets photos of house cats from people who believe they saw a cougars.

Dowling and other experts said the few genuine sightings are of former pets. Experts estimate there are at least 1,000 captive cougars in the East, although many states have outlawed keeping cougars as pets.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife review, due this winter, is expected to put to rest the question of whether mountain lions still roam eastern forests. If it finds the eastern cougar is extinct, it will be removed from the list of endangered species.

Those in favor of reintroducing cougars say it is a way to restore some of the natural balance to the ecosystem. The cougar’s favorite meal is deer, whose increasing numbers cause an estimated 1.5 million auto accidents and 150 deaths annually.

McCollough said that though the natural habitat is well suited, the fears of Easterners accustomed to life without the world’s fourth-largest cats might be the bigger impediment to reintroduction.

“The biological issues are probably not as difficult to deal with as the social or political issues,” he said.

Officials estimate that there are as many as 35,000 mountain lions in the West, including some in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. And some are inching eastward.

A cougar kitten was hit by a truck in Kentucky in 1997, one cougar was killed and another captured in West Virginia in 1976 and scientists verified droppings in Massachusetts in 1997.

Earlier this year, police killed a cougar in Chicago that was traced through Wisconsin from South Dakota. Sightings have been confirmed in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.

But experts say those are isolated incidents.

Hundreds of motion-activated cameras dot forests throughout the East, including locations in Great Smoky Mountain National Park and along the Appalachian Trail. The results: hundreds of photos of bears, deer and other critters but no cougars.

“I don’t want to come out and say that everybody who says they’ve seen a mountain lion is a crackpot or mistaken, but if the cats were there, I believe we would be confirming them” through road kill, trail cameras or other means, said Jay Tischendorf, president of the nonprofit Eastern Cougar Foundation.

Blackstone recently set up a few cameras in the woods with the hope of getting proof, and the town’s lone animal control officer’s hours were changed to allow time to patrol for the nocturnal cat.

In September, town officials made a cast of what they believed was a cougar track and sent it to state biologists.

The determination: inconclusive.

Sue Cobbs doesn’t need proof. She knows what she saw twice near her Blackstone home. In June, a big brown cat with a long tail chased a deer through her backyard. A month later, she saw one outside her neighbor’s house.

Like Goodwyn, she’s now a little more careful when she goes outside. “Every time I take my dogs out to go to the bathroom,” she said, “I’m standing there watching the horizon.”