Ghost cat sightings continue throughout region

Michael Jenkins of Lubec entered his house one night in the fall of 2010 and calmly told his wife, Sheree, "I just saw a puma." He had driven home at night and had to stop the car to avoid hitting a large cat brightly illuminated by the car's headlights standing in the middle of the road about 50 feet away. Jenkins says the cat had a long body and a long tail and was larger than any cat he had ever seen. It was a medium brown color with a noticeable dark tip on its tail. He was amazed and watched the cat walk away into the dark area beside the road. Sheree says her husband knows the wildlife of Maine and has hunted there for many years.
He is not the only person who has seen a large cat in the Lubec area during the fall and winter months of 2010‑2011. Sonia Bailey and other residents in Lubec all agree it was not a bobcat, lynx, wolf or coyote. They think they saw a puma. One witness found large tracks in the snow as the animal seemed to be leaping along and measured the distance between tracks as 17 feet. Perhaps this is the animal rumored to have been seen by people in the towns of Perry, Cutler and East Machias during fall and winter of 2010‑2011 as well.
Puma is only one of the names of this powerful, majestic and often mysterious "ghost cat." In Central and South America, they are referred to as pumas, which in the Incan language means "powerful animals." In North America they have been called cougar, mountain lion, puma, panther, painter, deer tiger, Indian devil and catamount. The actual scientific genus and species is Felis concolor or "cat of one color." There are about 30 subspecies, 14 of which are North American. Two of these are the Florida panther or Felis concolor coryi and the eastern panther or Felis concolor couguar.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has published a report which states that the agency believes the eastern panther is now extinct. In 1967 it had been one of the first species to be put on the federal endangered species list. Canada also listed the eastern panther as endangered in 1978. Hefty fines and even imprisonment could have resulted from injuring, harassing, hunting or trapping them.
In November 2010 the Western Maine Audubon Society invited Mark McCullough to be a guest speaker at a location in Farmington. McCullough is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who spent three years researching and writing the report recently released to the public in Maine that concluded eastern panthers are extinct in Maine. During his program "The Eastern Cougar: Wild Cats or Wild Imagination," he explained that the eastern panther/cougar was once endemic in Maine. But by the end of the 19th century they were almost eradicated because of unregulated hunting and trapping and habitat destruction. The last confirmed cougar in Maine was in 1938 near the Quebec border. Many of the people in the audience told him they had recently seen large cats with long tails that they thought were cougars.
McCullough then explained the three hypotheses that state and federal wildlife biologists believe could explain these sightings in Maine and elsewhere. One is that they could be escapees from captivity or intentional releases of captive‑raised cats. Florida panthers are genetic mixtures of North American and South/Central American cougars. A cougar cub/kitten killed by a car in 1997 in Kentucky had a similar mixed heritage. Another hypothesis is they are transients dispersing from known existing breeding populations of cougars in the Midwest and Canada and entering Maine. Both male and female cougars travel great distances to search for food, to mate, and to set up a home territory. A biologist for a research project radio‑collared a cougar in South Dakota in February 2003, and in May 2004 it was found killed by a train near Red Rock, Oklahoma. It had traveled 700 miles and perhaps crossed four state lines.
The last hypothesis is that the eastern panther was not wiped out and still exists. It is being seen by people in areas in the Canadian Maritime provinces and the eastern United States.
Many people in Maine have been seeing what they think are cougars and really do not care where the cats came from. Their sightings have been published in newspapers and in reports to the wildlife agencies. Some of these have included photographs, videotapes and digital tapes of animals and/or their tracks.
The Eastern Puma Research Network (EPRN) was the first volunteer wildlife organization in the eastern United States to create a central clearinghouse for logging in reports from people in the eastern United States and the eastern Canadian provinces. At present they have over 20,000 reports. In 2009 they documented 625 cougar, 80 large black cat and 11 cub sightings from many people, including wildlife and forestry management and law enforcement in the United States and Canada. Three reports originated from Nova Scotia; nine each from New Brunswick, Connecticut and Massachusetts; 20 from New Hampshire; 10 from Vermont; five from Rhode Island; and 33 from Maine. EPRN accepts all reports and encourages people to send them their information to either EPRN, HC 30 Box 2233, Maysville, WV 26833 or e-mail <epuma@hardynet.com>. One can also call the 24-hour phone line at 1‑304‑749‑7778. Their website is <www.eprn.homestead.com>.
These cats seem like profoundly mysterious phantoms and are maddeningly elusive, and sightings are hard to prove. But on June 11, 2011, a large cat weighing 140 pounds was hit by a car on a highway in Milford, Conn. It collapsed and died on the roadside. Various news media photographed the cat and put it in the newspapers and on the Internet. Results of DNA tests and the necropsy are to be released soon. Meanwhile, sightings of what residents are calling "cougars" are still continuing. Before the cat was found dead, people in nearby Greenwich, located only 30 miles away, were reporting sightings of a large cougar‑like cat. Sightings are still occurring in that area.
Recently hair and scat were confirmed as being from cougars at two sites in Canada C Fundy National Park in New Brunswick and a site south of Quebec City.
Several books and reports about the eastern panther were written by the late Dr. Bruce Wright of New Brunswick. He called the cat he saw on a road there in 1966 "the flesh and blood ghost of the forest." Does the eastern panther still exist there and in Maine and elsewhere? The mystery continues.

(Reporter Karen Holmes is a volunteer for the Eastern Puma Research Network.)