The cat craze has moved to the front page. Iamagine that!

Yes, there it was, front and center, in Wednesday’s Recorder. A sighting off Deerfield Street in Greenfield. At the condos across from the street from The Meadows Golf Course. Jumped up onto a shed roof. Long tail. We’ve heard it all before. Who knows where it’ll end?

Actually, I had already put together a column that didn’t include the condo sighting, so I’ll have to splice it into the existing narrative, always tricky, but too interesting to ignore and hold for another week. So, let’s proceed.

Since my last mention of cougars a couple of weeks ago — and prior to the Greenfield sighting — three more reports, one new, two old, plus a color snapshot of a large bobcat, possibly a Canada lynx, in Shelburne Falls. It’s getting wild.

First, the big cats, led by one reportedly spotted on the morning of March 21, in Northfield by Cynthia Daly and her husband. The Daly’s were traveling south on Route 142, about a quarter-mile from Route 10 and a half-mile west of the Connecticut River, “on property owned by Bob Cook of Cook Excavating.” The cat was walking a fence line. Another car headed in the opposite direction also saw it and stopped to observe.

Ms. Daly estimated the body length to be about 40 inches, with “a long tail which it held curled upward as it turned to look at us from the fencepost before leaping over.” Further description as grayish-brown with some spotting and a pale face, coupled with the short length, led me to suspect Ms. Daly had seen a bobcat, not a cougar, even though the tail leaned toward cougar.

En route to a doctor’s appointment at around 8 a.m., the Dalys were pressed for time and could not investigate further at the time of the sighting. But a couple of hours later, on their return trip, they stopped and found large cat tracks visible atop the crusty snow. Ms. Daly measured the prints at 3.5 inches across and expects they would have been wider in ideal tracking snow. She could clearly see where the animal had broken through the crust after jumping the fence.

The other two cougar sightings reported to me have fewer holes. The first came from an old South Deerfield acquaintance who’s been reading about the local sightings recently. He decided it was time for him to chime in with his tale. It occurred about five years ago with fresh snow on the ground in the woods between Route 116 in South Deerfield and Whately Glen Road in Whately.

“I’ve had a thorn in my craw for quite a while, almost called you a few times then decided against it,” he said. “Tonight, I said, “What the hell?” and gave you a jingle.”

His story began upon entering familiar woods at mid-afternoon during deer season, drawn there by fresh snow and the approaching dusk. Figuring deer would be moving out of their beds before dark, he walked quietly through the woods and came to a small clearing, where he spotted an elevation on which to “post-up” on. He walked there, kicked out a spot and sat down to wait for sundown.

He wasn’t hunkered down long before he spotted movement and focused on it, thinking it was a deer. When the animal moved into the opening, it cut his tracks and followed them toward his stand. Then it stopped, froze, turned and left the area.

“I think it finally winded me, but I know what I saw,” he said. “It was a Conway cougar, the size of a large dog with a fire-hose tail. There was no mistaking it. It got pretty close.”

Our final cougar sighting was reported by Greenfield’s Amy and Dan Yates, who spotted it in the Bars section of Deerfield in late January or early February 2003. They e-mailed a report of their sighting to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service address (easterncougar@fws.gov) devoted to investigating evidence that the Eastern cougar is back. The message was also sent to my home e-mail address.

The Yates were traveling south along the Deerfield River on Mill Village Road when, about a half-mile from Stillwater Road, Ms. Yates spotted an animal walking along the opposite bank of the river. She described it as “a large cat with a very long tail, light brown/gray colored.”

When they stopped their car and exited with a 35mm camera, the cat heard the doors shut, stopped walking and looked at them. “The safety of the river between us allowed us to stand still and take a better look,” wrote Amy Yates. “The cat sat down and watched us.”

Dan Yates snapped off some shots with his camera but had only a standard lens without the capability to zoon in, and the black-and-white shots revealed little.

“We watched each other for 5-8 minutes before the cat turned its back to us and walked up the bank toward fields along Lower Road. We watched it until it was out of sight, then drove along Lower Road to no avail.

“We definitely know what we saw — we only wish we’d had a better lens to get a good picture of it.”

As for the bobcat/lynx sighting in Shelburne Falls, it was reported by Bob Bassett, who lives on Purington Road and has seen it several times in his yard. The accompanying photo told the story. Bassett thought it may be a Canada lynx after reading about them here but, after sharing snapshots with knowledgeable outdoorsmen, has decided it’s more likely a 50-pound bobcat, a rare sight in and of itself.