Stuck in Their Ways

It’s bewildering how wildlife officials continue to turn deaf ears and blind eyes toward Northeastern cougar sightings. They should know better given what happened in Florida about 20 years ago, not to mention what is happening today in Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. You’d think doctoral-level scientists worth their salt would learn from their mistakes, or at least be cautious about routinely dismissing credible sightings. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, and it doesn’t surprise Buckland Yankee Roger Ward one smidgen.

Known to his friends as Hezekiah because of his Biblical middle name, Ward could be on the right track in his assessment of some highly credentialed experts. “You know what we say about those people up here, don’t you?” he said. “We say ‘They’ve had too much college and not enough grammar school.’”

Too much college, not enough grammar school? That’s a good one.

Ward has fresh personal experience to draw from, a case that brought MassWildlife authorities to the scene “four or five years ago.” The incident involved a pony Ward’s daughter was boarding at Peter Bravmann’s Conway horse farm. The animal appeared to have been killed and partially eaten overnight and, because there had been a couple of big-cat sightings at the nearby Crafts Farm on the Buckland road, there was reason to suspect a cougar kill. The authorities didn’t want to hear about it, though; concluded that the pony had died of natural causes, then a predator, possibly a bear or coyote, had come upon it and nibbled on the hindquarter. Ward, a longtime woodsman and hunter, wasn’t convinced. Neither was the property owner.

“Bravmann said the animal was perfectly healthy the night before, dead and chewed up the next morning,” Ward said. “I went up there and saw the carcass. It had claw marks on the neck that looked suspicious. The tracks looked more like a cat than a canine to me, but I’m no expert.”

The reaction of the MassWildlife officials called to that scene shouldn’t be surprising; it fits a pattern of  “official response” to other potential cougar evidence along the Eastern Seaboard from Florida to Canada over the past 25 years, according to “The Eastern Cougar: Historic Accounts, Scientific Investigations, New Evidence,” edited by Chris Bolgiano and Jerry Roberts and published last year. In the meantime, there has be indisputable evidence uncovered in Florida, Arkansas, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — evidence as convincing as road kills — along with newfound cougar populations in the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan. So if the big cats have already recolonized those states, what’s to stop them from expanding into other wild historic haunts like the Catskills and Adirondacks in New York, the Green and White Mountains in New England and the Appalachians in the mid-Atlantic states? The simple answer appears to be: not a thing.

The Florida controversy of the 70s and 80s is a persuasive example, one the authorities ought to pay special attention to when evaluating potential cougar re-emergence elsewhere. Similar to today in the Northeast, increasing Florida panther sightings were being reported around deep, dense Florida swamps back then. Wildlife officials initially responded to those sightings the same way they treat Northern sightings today — mistaken identity, escaped pet, outright hoax — and stubbornly dug in their heels . A reproductive, native population of Florida panthers believed to be extinct since the first decade of the 20th century was out of the question, they said. Well, guess what? They were wrong. Indeed there is a native population, and its range is moving north and west due to an unavoidable population increase.

Simultaneously, experts have been forced to admit that Western cougars have repopulated Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin, and now the evidence is there to place them in Michigan’s Great Lakes region. It’s a simple formula: Adult males push out immature males, which are forced into new habitats and are, in due time, followed by young females that ultimately mate with the migrant males to expand the species’ range. Reforestation of previously cleared land is the key, and there is no shortage of that here in the Northeast, not to mention Appalachia.

The aforementioned new “Eastern cougar” book documents the entire story of the Quabbin scat sample collected in April 1997 on the Quabbin Reservation by animal tracker John McCarter. Then a teacher at Paul Rezendes’ Tracking School, McCarter came upon the kind of cougar evidence state and federal wildlife officials demand before attaching “legitimate” status to it. The site in the Franklin County town of New Salem included a partially buried beaver carcass, aggressively scratched earth, and several covered scats. McCarter collected scat samples, shipped them off to two respected laboratories, and both used DNA analysis to identify their specimens as Eastern cougar scat. That said, the official assessment from MassWildlife was that a domestic “Eastern cougar” had escaped and passed through the Quabbin.

UMass graduate student Noah Charney followed up the McCarter discovery with a field-research project at the Quabbin but came up with no further evidence of resident Quabbin cougars. His most interesting discovery between May 2004 and May 2005 was remains of a moose carcass found at the Quabbin. He collected samples at the scene, had it analyzed and found no biological cougar evidence. “The remains were old and not ideal for research,” he reported.

Apprised of the cougar-sighting data this space has collected over the past two months, Charney is reviewing it and plans to follow up on a plaster cast of a suspected cougar track found in Buckland and a photo taken of a similar track in a Shelburne orchard.

Stay tuned. A coordinated effort to find cougar evidence could get interesting.

Experts say there is no tangible evidence to support an Easter cougar comeback.

I suppose the most pertinent question is: How hard have they looked?

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