Now and then MassWildlife gets a report with a photo of a mountain lion. Thank you very much for that story really appreciate it. So take care of this problem. Please limit your input to 500 characters. by BCR. John. Patrick's reporting has appeared on NPR's Morning Edition, Here & Now, and All Things Considered. Thanks for calling. Patrick Tate: No downward pressure at all I think actually Sean turned up and we found the evidence there a number of people would finally say finally we can put this debate to bed. So I certainly can't dispute anything that they said there's no evidence for me to go by to verify or say what my thoughts are on the situation. Peter Biello: So a little bit of nostalgia maybe for it for a better world embodied in the mountain lion. Caller: And the more I thought about it the color of it it was definitely not a bobcat. To Betty and Ottmann, the dominant narrative of the occasional itinerant cougar from the West is not particularly relevant to the facts on the ground. Wildlife do really crazy things, and you just never know.. Long before NASA was asked to put a man on the moon one engineer had already figured out how to get there. I'm Peter B yellow. Records suggest that cash bounties for cougar kills were relatively common in the late 1700s and early 1800s; in the Adirondacks, a trapper named Thomas Meacham was credited with 77 cougar kills. So and so the idea that they can follow up on every individual sighting is just crazy right. So when we hear mountain lion there's also cougar there's wild cat there's Bobcat which is not a mountain lion maybe Patrick could you sort of spell out the different terms which are synonymous and which are completely different animals. Have a photo. So hard to know hard to refute if there's no interest in making up a story which many people of course do then I would respond the same way as Pat did. New Hampshire Fish and Game Department says there's no proof. In April 1997, tracker John McCarter found scat near a beaver carcass at the Quabbin Reservation. You might think that it would be easy to tell the two cat species apart. There was no sign of it. Something along those lines. Have you heard stories do you have questions about the mountain line. Lion tales: Some believe cougars occasionally roam the N.H. forests And I saw you cat about four feet long from nose to tail come across from the water across the road and just leap over a six foot perimeter fence in a single bound. MassWildlife cannot investigate or confirm mountain lion reports without any evidence. Both cases meet the evidence requirements of MassWildlife. Peter Biello: We mentioned that the eastern cougar and the Western cougar are they were separate eastern cougar believed to be extinct. So so they're just a very resilient species and they're pretty they're pretty neat. ghost, Re(3): didnt win the pwrball. hen I accepted the assignment to write about my quest to uncover the truth regarding the existence of cougars in New England, I had little idea what I was agreeing to. Rick van de Poll: Well education is the real important thrust of of what all of us do as biologists and Game Managers and to make sure that a things like what Sam was saying that in spite of what you believe the mountain lions will not eat your children they will not steal your pets from your backyard and they will not necessarily be seen by you unless you're extremely lucky. Lets learn to live alongside this very large animal is one of the schools of thought. Patrick Tate: Nice talk to you too. Please remove any contact information or personal data from your feedback. Mistaken reports of mountain lions in Massachusetts are most commonly Bobcats. So what I'm getting back is the verifying and confirming of evidence what that was not there. Those are the two closest populations that we have here. Rye NH Mountain Lion sighting - By Iiro Lehtinen September 19, 2016 at 02:24:00 PM. It is difficult to know if someone saw a mountain lion without any tangible evidence. Caller: I have yeah. OK. Rick van de Poll: Rick and I would add that if a mountain lion male takes up residence and successfully finds a female as pets there's gonna be a lot more evidence there will be like deer carcasses up in trees and territorial marking and claw marks and tracks and it you know dispersal is gonna be very tough to see or observed but residential parrots a totally different story. In 1994, scat collected after a sighting in Craftsbury, Vermont, was found to contain cougar hair (the animals are prone to ingesting their hair while grooming), and the commissioner of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department circulated a memo with the following line: Harrigans interest in cougars was sparked in the late 70s, after he took ownership of, Perhaps, then, the ultimate question isnt whether cougars are among us, but rather how we can encourage them to settle here, After 20 minutes or so, we turned and stumbled our way back to the parking lot. We mentioned that one cat that was hit by a car where it has it that it was a male looking for me. By mid-19th century, forests made up only about 30 percent of New England (its notable that today that number stands at approximately 80 percent, nearer to what it was when cougars thrived here). She quotes a biologist in Lyme New Hampshire who who is keeping two mountain lions himself so in the not too distant past in the early nineteen hundreds it was perhaps more common and still in Maine. If its not, you just thank the person and say good-bye.. If it's just in the middle of a greenfield you can't prove anything. There, too, is Crowells photograph, grainy and old: the hunter leaning against a tree stump, his head propped casually on his left hand, elbow to stump, shotgun cradled in the crook of his right arm. The truth is, I was by this point dubious. And trying to figure out the little pieces to identify him so I bring up the names the differences but the appearances can be confusing for some. Case 1 Less than a year later I found a scat on the swamp range and I was working at the time with a fellow at the Michigan wildlife habitat Federation. A typical adult male will weigh up to. It's one piece that he wrote, that I have used in discussing the possibility of hard-to-believe sightings and I quote, People are always hopeful that what they have seen is something unusual, rather than just common and mundane.. It's you know I recognized their report and. Sam Evans Brown. Rick van de Poll: Well I didn't. I'll send it to you. Post a New Message | Search | New England Mountain Lion Sighting Bulletin Board . 1 800 8 9 2 6 4 7 7. So I've been convinced the whole time that I saw a big cougar plume or whatever you want to call it standing there in the road in Greenfield. Oh well, not much I can do about that., William B., of Pittsfield wrote, I learned something from your column about invasive species. While State Denies Mtn Lions are in NH, Numerous Sightings Say Colorado and California have the highest estimated populations of mountain lions in the United States.