Westford, MA, crossing Dunstable Rd from Long Sought For Pond into the woods. It was a bright sunny summer day. A wildlife camera snapped the image in late 2019 and the refuge shared it on Facebook this month, challenging followers to find the hidden mountain lion. There are so many great sites out there devoted to. The mountain lionalso known as the cougar, puma, panther, or catamountis a large cat species native to the Americas. Morse, 70, comports herself in a friendly and no-nonsense manner. 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. The last catamount killed in Vermont was shot in 1881. The restrictions/regulations surrounding management of an endangered species is incredibly cumbersome, and would be difficult to manage. 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. Even though the experts say there arent any mountain lions in CT, there are. Provided by Touchpoints You dont even have to go out and look for it.. Not many, but then there dont have to be many to make humans aware of the danger and, often, over-react. So the initial assumption was that the animal was one of those captives that had either escaped or been released by its owner. Out & About | Best New England Holiday Events for 2019. But they would certainly pay attention if they did see one. But it was also a male. What color was it? Lizzie Post Would Like Your Attention. In my case, I had seen just about everything else in the Vermont woods in the several years that I had been going out, and not just during deer season. As they watched in amazement, the cat casually moved off and disappeared into the surrounding woods. I appreciated Ottmann and Bettys confidence and commitment, but here I was, poking through thorny thickets behind a bar, trailing a bleeding man whose devotion to proving the presence of cougars was beginning to seem like a quixotic quest with no end. The combined scoring differential in those matchups was 158-77. And, in the real world, a black bears fatal attack on a hiker in New Jersey last year made many people reconsider their warm feelings for that animal. She favors plaid shirts, green Dickies work pants, and hiking boots, and she chided me for shaking her hand too gently. Now, ocelots are critically endangered and jaguarundis might be completely gone. Ive seen tracks (Downeast Maine) and others have seen them, plain as day. Check out 4 Seconds Until Impact by Bruce Hemming, or Cat Urbigkits books about predator attacks in unlikely places . Before I departed the Old Well Tavern, Bo Ottmann offered to lead me on a walk into an adjacent stretch of woods, where, he assured me, cougars might be found. As cleared lands became reforested, many species that had been squeezed into small regions where there was still habitat,or hunted to near extinction, could be replanted in their former range. As pets or for exhibit. His mention of these encounters was so matter-of-fact that I found myself nodding along. I was driving to work in Greenfield heading south on 10 and had just taken a right hand turn at the junction when the big cat crossed the road in front of me. It looked real promising, Blodgett remembers. Clearly, Puma concolor once inhabited the forests of the Northeast, although its difficult to say in what numbers. It was his great coolness and daring (either that, or fear) that enabled Crowell to shoot the animal at a distance of one rod only (roughly 16 feet), first hitting it in the leg with his shotgun, then dispatching it with a bullet to the head from a borrowed rifle. I dont ever say to people, Thats not what you saw. I say, I hope you saw one, Spatz told me when I called him at his home in upstate New York. 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. People said that the catamountas the animal is called in Vermontwas still around and you heard stories about someone who would swear to having seen one. Geoffrey Norman is a Dorset author and a frequent contributor to Stratton Magazine. Although the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the . Theres probably 100 in Connecticut, Ottmann interrupted, rolling a cigarette as he spoke. When he suggested we retrace our route, past lion, to see a sow bear with cubs, we headed in the opposite direction. Then, follow-up DNA researchmatching samples from the carcass with those from scat and hair collected in other locationsestablished that the animal had come to Connecticut from the Black Hills of North Dakota. Height. Of course. This guy was very intelligent, he had abandoned a professional career to pursue his dream of guiding. And, he says, if they were here, wouldnt one have been killed on one of the states highways where cars and trucks travel some 9 million miles every year? The last catamount in Vermont is finally, officially, certainly dead. This isnt to say she believes none of these animals has stepped foot on New England soil over the past century. Its OK, he told me. Growing up in northern Vermont, Id heard stories of sightings, though always a few steps removed from the tellersomebodys cousin had seen a cougar cross the road on their way home from deer camp up in Canaan (or was it Coventry? I saw an adult cougar/catamount twice within a two week period. And why not? Within six weeks, he continued, I was getting off the plane in Jackson Hole for a national mountain lion conference. You wouldnt shake hands with a man like that, she said, and though she was smiling I could tell she was serious. Apex predators like the cougar and wolf make for a healthier ecosystem. Because they are.. Even in areas of high cougar density, the there are far more attacks on humans by domesticated dogs or deer/car collision fatalities than those due to cougar attack. In fact, jaguars used to be native to south Texas, as well! Recall a few years back, a guy in a kayak off Horseneck Beach in Westport, MA, was tracked by a large fin. Bill and I are full-throttle. Probably because of all the hunters that would be out trying to get their trophy and endangering others. Could be a deer, but it didnt seem to be tall enough. The habitat is certainly right, with so many farms having gone by and so much formerly cleared land returning to second growth forest and with the populations of prey species suchas deer and porcupines having reached abundant proportions. And it was this curiosity that led me to the Old Well Tavern in Simsbury, Connecticut, at a time of day (11:30 a.m.) that does not normally find me ensconced in the dim confines of a drinking establishment. I mentioned this to a neighbor who spotted one a few miles away. Still, I wanted to believe those sightings were real. He never found the evidence. But some sightings were more promising and some seemed exceedingly so. The Spatz and Sue Ottmann referred to are Christopher Spatz and Sue Morse, two of the better-known and arguably most experienced cougar skeptics in the Northeast. Nostalgia for the Wild my father was recently trout fishing in central Mass. The first European settlers arrived in the Texas Hill country in the early 1800s and viewed mountain lions as a dangerous threat to their own survival as well as a predator threat to their livestock. The cat is dead. It is what wildlife biologists call an apex carnivore, which means it can overpower pretty much any other creature in its environmentwith the exception of an armed human. The second occasion was on the way to work when I saw the cougar/catamount crossing Route 44. We met for lunch on a Sunday morning in early March, and it didnt take long for me to understand why Harrigan is such a popular columnist. The glasses I carried were of good quality with exceptional light-gathering property. Bernier gets more than 50 reports of mountain lions a year. Americans called the mountain " Tah-wak-be-dee-ee-wads. Anticipating, perhaps, a moment like this. I thought about why this might be and the best I could come up with for an answer is that we feel a kind of nostalgia for the wild. If he was not determined to prove that someone had actually seen a mountain lion in Vermonthe is a scientist, after allhe was still excited by the possibility. Probably are lions in western NC, too. There was no mistake. Still, there is no saying that it will not happen. What time of day was it? Yes I have seen several pictures on game cameras from people in Massachusetts in Central and western Mass that do have mountain lions on their game camera so please dont be ignorant. It is also known as cougar, panther, mountain lion, and puma, though catamount is the preferred regional vernacular. I did call in a report to CT DEP and they basically dismissed my narrative questioning whether I made a mistake confusing the animal I saw with a bobcat or fisher cat. The tails gotta be there. Blodgett and I were returning from a day spent looking forand finding timber rattlesnakes, a species that is endangered in Vermont. I have no choice but to take this seriously, he told me. Somebody in the NC Legislature believes, because lions are now protected by law. Camel's Hump (alternatively Camels Hump) is a mountain in the Green Mountains in the U.S. state of Vermont.The north slope of the mountain borders the Winooski River, which has carved through the Green Mountains over eons.At 4,083 ft (1,244 m), it is tied (with Mount Ellen) for the third-highest mountain in Vermont.Surrounded by 10 acres (4 ha) of alpine tundra, the mountain is the most . [Betty] and the other guys dont do this shit. Big kitty. Friends that go backcountry skiing in Vermont have reported seeing tracks to me many times and I have seen pictures of the pawprints myself that look overwheming like a mountain lion. Interesting how tree stumps or boulders assume the shape of an animal in this kind of light. We really must establish first that these beautiful animals SHOULD be in every state that was once THEIR habitat. For instance, a favorite food for deer is the seedlings of forest tree species. I saw on three occasions in about the same location a beautiful mtn lion with the long bushytail that curves at the end. Can they really all be cases of false identification? 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. Concerned for people / pets and a school just down the street, stopped to report the sighting where dispatch told me that if I did not have proof they would not respond. The animal that was killed in Connecticut proved that. 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