Before 6 a.m. on a spring morning, Amanda Gaffigan Steele of Plainfield was taking a circuitous route to work in Hatfield, traveling toward Greenfield on Route 2 near the overgrown Mohawk Mountain ski trails when she noticed something unusual crossing the road near Jed’s Cider Mill. Of a grayish brown hue, the large animal carried a long tail that curled gently toward the sky. No doubt about it: big cat.

“You’re not gonna put my name in the paper, are you?” she asked, when called at home.

“That’s the plan,” I responded.

“Well, OK, but I hope people don’t think I’m crazy.”

It’s a fear cougar sightings stir in most witnesses’ souls; one of being written off as a lunatic. But still the reports keep coming, and coming, and coming.

You be the judge of this witness’ sanity.

Known as Mandy to friends, the pregnant, 34-year old Shelburne Falls native had just passed the moccasin place on the trail when the animal appeared in the road, crossing slowly from out of the brook hole near Jed’s toward the old Schechterle place. In no great hurry, it reached the guardrail, walked over it effortlessly and disappeared into the greening forest to Steele’s right.

“I never got a look at its face because it was looking the other way, but I know what I saw and it wasn’t a bobcat or a coy dog, a deer or bear,” Steele said. “What I noticed most was the long tail, curved upward. It was a mountain lion. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Overcome with excitement, Steele called he mother, Bunny Tirrell, on a cell phone, waking her from a sound sleep at home. “She said she was amazed by its powerful shoulders,” Tirrell reported. “Big, powerful shoulders. That’s what she told me.”

But her mom wasn’t the only person she phoned. She also called her grandfather, Bill Gaffigan, at his Buckland-side home overlooking Cricket Field. An experienced hunter of coons, cats, deer, you name, Bill Gaffigan has probably hunted it.

“I was reluctant to call him because he’s apt to give me a hard time,” Steele admitted. “But not this time. He believed me. He said people have been seeing mountain lions around here lately.”

She learned later that not only have there been many recent sightings, there had been some right around where she saw hers. That’s a fact. Many reports have come from within a mile or two of hers; even a track in the mud in an old apple orchard a stone’s throw from Jed’s, one a veteran local outdoorsman identified as a cougar’s, only to be overruled by state wildlife officials who identified it from photos as a dog track. The local outdoorsman didn’t buy it.

Where the beast Steele encountered last week will show up next is anyone’s guess. Could be Shelburne or Conway or Becket or Saratoga for that matter. Big cats cover a lot of territory. But if it happens to cross your path, don’t bother alerting the authorities. They have a pat answer written in bold letters across their desktop calendar pads. It reads: “Eastern cougars have been extinct for nearly a century.”

The “official” stance. Go figure.

Betty Waidlich may start getting strange looks again from people who recognize her making her daily rounds at the supermarket, gas station or beauty salon. A half century later, she’s letting the cat out the bag, so to speak — a big cat she told friends about in 1956, when she was stunned to see a “huge black panther” out a bedroom window from her Mineral Road residence in Montague, MA.

Waidlich remembers the year precisely because it was daughter Donna’s year of birth. The month was August. Newborn Donna and siblings Linda and John were right there with their mom for the sighting. “John was only two at the time,” Waidlich said. “But he still remembers it. I held him up to the window to see it. I guess it left a deep impression. Linda was 6. She remembers it very well. … My friends? Well, their response was, ‘What were you drinking?’ ”

The landed Waidlich estate sits on an idyllic spot near the confluence of the Millers and Connecticut rivers, behind the Turners Falls Airport — a location long known to wildlife enthusiasts as a sanctuary. So the Waidlich’s had grown accustomed to seeing wildlife but nothing quite as exotic as a panther.

“I don’t think a day has gone by without me thinking about that cat,” she said. “Then, when I read in your column that Rocky Stone saw a black panther out his window in Athol in 1956, I felt vindicated. I knew it was the same year I saw mine, and Athol isn’t that far up the Millers River.”

What drew the cat to the Waidlich property was a backyard fire pit, where the family had enjoyed many cookouts that summer. “Friends would come over with their kids and we had been cooking out regularly, usually steak. You know how kids are, they’d run around, leave bones and scraps, and animals would clean them up.”
Waidlich said she sensed there was something new in the area because her dogs seemed unnerved for a day or two, but she never suspected a panther.

“The dogs were acting funny, kind of nervous, and I knew something had been there because I could see where it had been scratching for food,” she recalled. “I’d say the cat probably hung around for a couple of days and moved on.”

The family had set up a tent for the kids near the fire pit, and Waidlich spotted the animal exiting the canvas shelter. “It emerged from the tent, made its way to the fire pit, rummaged around a bit and was gone, never to be seen again,” at least not by the Waidlich family.

Stone doesn’t recall whether he saw his cat before or after Waidlich during that summer of ’56. His best guess is earlier than August. He was looking out his bedroom window off Highland Avenue in Athol when he spotted the black panther in a neighbor’s yard. “I probably watched it for a minute,” he recalled. “It jumped up into an apple tree, jumped down, walked through a sandbox, dropped down over a steep bank and disappeared. After it had been gone a while, I tried to find a good footprint in the sand, but it hadn’t left a clear print”

A half century ago, big-cat sightings in the Northeast were akin to UFO sightings, very rare, so it took guts to go public. But there seems to be an upsurge in sightings over the past quarter century and people are more willing to share their tales. Take Jody McKenzie of Conway. She doesn’t need to dredge her long-term memory to describe what she saw. Her sighting occurred recently. No, it wasn’t black, but it wasn’t difficult to identify, either. It was a mountain lion. No doubt about it. And it may be no coincidence that the sighting occurred within a mile of the cougar seen by hunter Mike Pekarski and within the same distance of a set of tracks this scribbler saw with his own aging brown eyes, overlooking the Deerfield River. The sighting was also “in the neighborhood” of several others both reported and not yet written about by me. They’re in the hopper.

The McKenzie sighting occurred about 5 p.m. on Valentines Day. She had just returned home and was walking her golden retriever to the mailbox. When the dog started acting peculiar and growled, McKenzie looked up and witnessed the mountain lion crossing the back 40. “It was no more than 100 feet from us and there was no mistaking it. It was about as tall as my dog with a sleek, curvy body and a long tail that curled at the end. It was crossing where many deer and coyotes seem to have a path. The mountain lion looked our way but didn’t seem bothered by our presence. My dog stayed at my side, growling — she seemed to know she shouldn’t charge. … I wish I had a camera in my hand but I knew if I went into the house it would be gone by the time I got back. So I just enjoyed watching it move across the field.”

Eastern cougars (felis concolor couguar) are also known as catamounts, pumas, mountain lions, and panthers. According to MassWildlife, the last known animal in Massachusetts was in Hampshire County in 1858, about the same time of the last official record of such an animal in Pennsylvania. The tint of their brown coats range from yellowish to reddish to grayish, and possibly black, although I have found no confirmation through cursory Internet research. Stone and other say they’ve seen it written that black ones exist, but cannot recall where. There is a Florida panther that’s brown, but it’s a different species. Black panthers are associated with the Southern Hemisphere

Adult mountain lion body length runs between five and nine feet, including the 28- to 35-inch tail. Weight ranges from 80 to 210 pounds. An average adult male weighs 160 pounds, while a female runs about 135. Their diet in the Northeast would be made up primarily of white-tailed deer, but would also include moose and smaller mammals, such as rabbits, raccoons and wild turkeys.

This is the six consecutive week local mountain lion sightings have been covered in this column, and there are many reports sitting on my desk that have not been shared. Colleague George Miller warned Tuesday night that I better back off this story before “the men in the black suits come knocking.”

I’ll take my chances. … Stay tuned.

What caught my attention on a midday stroll through the toasty dining room was a cardboard box on the wooden porch floor, next to it a packet of mail bundled with a heavy red rubber band. In the bundle was a sturdy white envelope with a return address to Northfield.

Yes! The pictures from Judy Radebaugh.

I pulled the tab to open the envelope and removed three pieces of paper folded vertically in half, color snapshots inside, three pictures of cat tracks, large ones discovered behind the Radebaugh barn. The three pages were computer printouts of cougar tracks and a brief description of the native big cats believed by experts to be extinct. Not everyone agrees with the ”official assessment,” though, particularly those, like Radebaugh, who have seen cougars. Last year she shared a tale about a large, long-tailed cat she encountered in her back yard. Now this.

Word of her latest discovery came by e-mail:

”Don’t know if you remember me but I wrote to you about a cougar sighting in our back yard here in Northfield. Well, yesterday David and I found some tracks behind our barn and I photographed them. Then I went on the Web and found pictures of cougar tracks. I do not have a scanner so I’m sending them to you to see for yourself.”

The photos show cat tracks measuring about 4½ inches wide. When I saw the ruler in the first photo, I took a similar 12-incher out of my desk’s top drawer, clenched my fist and measured it. Sure enough, the tracks were slightly larger across than my right fist, similar to the tracks brought to my attention a couple of years back while deer hunting with a friend in Conway. A former trapper who spent many a day in the local woods, my buddy had until then been a total non-believer in cougar sightings. Frankly, he had seen no evidence where you’d most expect to find it: in the woods. But as we compared our fists to the clear prints in fresh, wet snow that day, he reconsidered.

”Definitely cat tracks,” he told me as we stood on a steep lip overlooking the Deerfield River, ”but not bobcat; way too big.”

Perhaps the tracks had been left by a Canada lynx, and maybe that’s also what left the tracks photographed by Radebaugh. But they were not bobcat tracks, described by the online Wikipedia as ranging in size from 1 to 3 inches and averaging about 1.8. An online description of Canada lynx tracks say they can measure more than four inches across, which fits the bill for Radebaugh’s and the ones I personally saw. But, according to several online sources, Eastern cougar tracks range from three to four inches across, so you can’t rule that out, either.

The mystery endures.

…  Imagine that! An audible alert tells me a new e-mail has arrived. I maximize Outlook Express and the message is from Radebaugh. More cougar news:

”In the past two days we have had reports from friends that have seen cougars crossing Route 10 here in Northfield. Just too many reports to dismiss.”

Unless, of course, you’re a state or federal wildlife expert.

The phone message arrived at my Greenfield home Friday afternoon. Colleague Mark Durant left it. There had been a cougar sighting in West County, and the man who reported it, Will Blattner from Washington, D.C., had photos. Ah, for the wonders of BlackBerry technology.

Blattner had somehow gotten my name, left his cell-phone number and e-mail address, and wanted my e-mail address so he could send the images. Because it was a sighting with great potential for someone who’s written about the subject for decades, I quickly accommodated him and soon received three images taken from the bridge on Zoar Road at the Charlemont/Rowe border, within view of the Steele Brook Road outflow. The photos show a wildcat, no mistaking that, but unfortunately the tail is obscured by the background, so I would call the shots ”inconclusive” but worth sharing.

The sighting occurred during one of Blattner’s many visits with his grandparents, Jim Carse and Donna Marder, longtime West County residents with homes in Rowe and Charlemont. Can’t blame a man for wanting to share that little slice of West County paradise with kinfolk, huh?

Anyway, Blattner and his grandparents were heading into Charlemont for supplies Friday, when they noticed another car pulled over, obviously observing something. Then Blattner’s grandmother pointed and said, ”Look!” and they all saw what they believed to be a young cougar.

”It was amazing, it wouldn’t move,” Blattner recalled. ”That’s when I snapped off the first picture. When my grandma and I got out of the car, it turned and started to lazily walk off into the forest. It looked like a large cat with a thicker muzzle, and one color (light brown) for the most part. We believe it may have been an immature cougar because of its size.”

Blattner, who works in a D.C. television studio, knows photography and said he wishes he had had a better camera. He knows doubters will question his shots, and was quick to point out that he and his grandfather had been ardent non-believers in Franklin County cougar sightings until this one crossed their path.

”My grandfather has lived in Rowe for decades and he never believed anyone who told him they had seen a cougar,” Blattner wrote, ”but this really seemed like a cougar to all of us.”

I ran the most revealing of three photos with my column, the one about which Blattner wrote, ”You can clearly see that he has a long tail, which proves he cannot be a bobcat.”

I zoomed in on all three photos, which grew blurrier with each enlargement, and I cannot say my eyes saw any proof of a long tail.

I printed the photo in the paper and titled the column “Inconclusive.”

It took a while for a spring cougar sighting in Colrain to reach this space, but here it is, brought to my attention a few weeks ago by longtime friend and Shelburne selectman Joe Judd, himself an outdoor writer.

The date of the sighting isn’t clear and the woman who made it wasn’t real forthcoming with information. “This doesn’t need to be in any newspaper,” said an objecting Gerry Vight, who lives in Griswoldville, graduated from Arms Academy “100 years ago,” and wasn’t interested in revealing her age, her maiden name or much else of a personal nature. But, after devoting two months to similar Franklin County cougar sightings, I figured I couldn’t just ignore it.

The sighting occurred “before there were leaves on the trees,” according to Vight, who was walking toward the woods in her backyard with husband Lloyd. Two weeks later, presumably the animal was seen by the Vight’s neighbor crossing adjacent Call Road. “Must have been coming up from the (North) river,” Gerry Vight said.

The big cat witnessed by the Vights was headed in the opposite direction, coming down off the mountain, the other side of which would put you in Shelburne’s Patten District. As an amateur photographer who has taken snapshots of wildlife and hilltown landmarks for decades, Ms. Vight was prepared, carrying a digital camera and binoculars. “I carry a camera at all times,” she said in her hilltown twang. “Never know what you’re going to see; had a bear in my backyard last night.”

Vight said she and her husband would have never seen the cat had it not jumped from one large stone to another, about 200 feet away. She tried to get a photo as it sat on the rock but her camera was out of auto-focus and the animal was too far away for her 3X lens. “If I had my 10X, I would have had it,” she quipped. “But all I got was a picture of the limbs in front of me and a blurry cat.

“We watched it through binoculars. It was a cat, a big cat, just sitting there on the rock, looking around. We both got a good look at it, at least five feet long. ”

Asked if she considered calling anyone to report the sighting, she replied, “Call someone? Who? By the time anyone got there, it would have been gone. I like nature. No reason to call anyone.”

One of the first people the Vights told about their sighting was Colrain road boss James Sturgeon. “He’s quite a hunter, you know,” said Gerry Vight. “He told us no one would believe us unless we had a picture.”

Strugeon was right. Few people took the Vights’ sighting or the newspaper report seriously, despite the fact that so many local residents with no reason to lie have reported similar observances, many in the Colrain area. Still, from this perch, that’s no reason to ignore it. So here it is. Chew on it for a while and spit it out if the taste doesn’t suit you.

Another witness with no reason to lie or desire for publicity came forward to report a cougar sighting on Routes 5 & 10 in Deerfield.

“What exactly are they, anyways?” asked Steve Nartowicz of Greenfield. “I call it a mountain lion. Is that right? Or is it a cougar?”

Fact is it doesn’t matter. Cougar and mountain lion are acceptable, as are catamount, panther and wildcat; same predatory beast, different names. The official name for the indigenous Norhteastern animal is Eastern cougar.

Anyway, back to the Nartowicz sighting …

Traveling to work in South Deerfield before 7 a.m. on the last day of January, Nartowicz had passed Savage’s Market and, some 50 yards behind another car, was approaching the right-hand curve into the Wapping settlement when something on the east side of the road caught his attention. Reflex caused him to let off the gas pedal and, when the car ahead of him passed the critter, it quickly crossed the road in front of him. In three quick bounds the animal was across the pavement and on the lip overlooking a marsh, where it decided to climb about four feet up a small tree and look back at Nartowicz’s slow-moving vehicle. When the vehicle reached the animal and Nartowicz looked it square in the face from 10 or 15 feet away, it jumped down and ran west, toward the South Meadows and the stone-crusher section of the Deerfield River.

“I really don’t know much about cougar tendencies so I can’t say what it was trying to accomplish by climbing that tree,” Nartowicz said, “but it just stood there suspended, tail touching the ground, like it was waiting for me to pass. Then when I got too close, it took off.

“I was shocked. It was definitely a cougar. I saw its ears, it nose, its eyes. I know what coyotes look like,” and probably also knows they don’t climb trees.”

For this middle-aged scribbler it’s usually difficult to assess cougar sightings, many of which have been brought to my attention, because I know nothing about the witnesses. This case is different. Very much so. I happen to know Nartowicz and his family, having grown up around them in my hometown of South Deerfield, and it’s difficult for me to believe he was spinning a yarn.

“What are the state officials saying, anyway? Do they admit they’re here?” he asked.

“No,” I responded. “They refuse to acknowledge the presence of cougars in New England.”

As you can imagine, he had trouble accepting that.

“Unbelievable!” he said, choosing instead to believe his eyes.

Can’t say I blame him.

Try telling Gary Cole of Athol that Eastern cougars are extinct. He saw one cross the road in front of him. So did his wife.

In a neat, flawless, hand-written letter, Cole recounted his summer sighting that occurred around 7 p.m. as the couple crossed the Route 202 bridge crossing the Millers River. About 40 yards up the road, just past the east end of the bridge, Cole spotted an animal moving left to right toward the road, obviously contemplating a leap over the fence to cross. He assumed it was a deer but soon knew otherwise when it appeared in the road in front of him in full broadside display. Sightings get no better than broadside in the middle of a highway.

“The first thing I noticed was the tail,” Cole wrote. “It looked as long as the animal itself.”

Typical of all cougar sightings, the defining feature was the long tail; it’s always all about the long tail and large body of the big cat.

As the “four- to five-foot-long animal” passed, it looked straight at the Coles, providing them with a rare sighting. He described it as dark tan with a darker underbelly.

“It came from a swampy area and jumped the fence to a swampy area on the other side of the road,” wrote Cole. “I said to my wife, ‘Did you see that?’ She said, ‘Yes,’ and that it looked nothing like the bobcat we had seen at our house.”

What surprised Cole most was the location of his sighting, a “fairly well-populated place in the Athol/Orange area. I can see why people might balk at telling about seeing something like this, but it made a believer out of me.”

Another believer in a place where the experts think they ought to be institutionalized, or at least prescribed meds, because “Eastern cougars have been extinct for more than a century.”

That’s the official response.

Go figure.

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.

A few new developments on the cougar front that’s gaining momentum like a runaway locomotive on a steep descent since first mention of it here 15 months ago.

Let me think … what came first?

Oh yeah, the guy from Templeton. He’s been reading about cougars in this space and had something important to share; been trying unsuccessfully to contact me. Was I intentionally ignoring his e-mails or were they for some reason not reaching me?

I wrote back after receiving what he claimed was the third message he’d sent. “No, I’m not ignoring you, this is the first e-mail I’ve seen. Please tell. When’s the best time to reach you?”

He promptly replied with a phone number and the best time to reach him. I called and had a quick chat from my work desk. Seemed like a credible source. Has a friend who worked at the Quabbin several years. Friend says, regardless of what they say officially, it is know that cougars are living on the state reservation. Figure there’s six of them living there and, with plenty of food, they’re not ranging far. Supposedly there’s a known rocky location people stay away from … shallow caves the big cats seem to like.

“Please keep your mouth shut,” his friend reportedly told him. “I could get in trouble for talking about it. We are told not to admit anything. But they’re here and people know it.”

Sure, it sounds a little wild. But remember, there was a beaver kill-site found by a professional tracker in 1997, scat was collected, tested and identified as that of a cougar, an Eastern cougar. Backed into a corner, the authorities said it was an escaped pet, not a wild beast. Now this.

Hmmmm?

It gets better. …

When I came into work a night or two later, a colleague told me to listen to a message on my voicemail, “You’ll be interested.”

Sure enough, I was. … It was a local state cop I’ve known for many years. A cougar crossed the road in front of his wife last week on Route 9, around Cummington. No mistaking it, a big cat. “Been reading your columns about the subject and thought I’d pass it along. Guess they’re here.”

More fuel to the fire. And, believe me, I don’t go looking for it. It’s been coming at me in a steady stream since last winter. Where it ends, only time will tell.

A couple of days ago, midday, another Recorder colleague e-mailed me a link to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about big-cat sightings in western Pennsylvania. The Sunday story is accompanied by a picture of a large cat track in the snow next to the boot of a Post-Gazette account executive who discovered it on a hike.

The report is nothing new in western Pennsylvania or elsewhere in the Northeast, where, according to the article, there have been more than 1,000 sightings of big cats with long tails in recent years. That’s probably a modest estimate given the many reports we’re received right here in the greater Pioneer Valley.

Although no one from a wildlife agency visited the Pennsylvania site to confirm that the tracks had indeed been made by a cougar, neither the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGM) nor the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFW) was willing to deny the possibility.

“I never say never when it comes to these kinds of things,” said PGM spokesman Mel Schake. “There are enough of these calls coming in from around the state that there’s something out there. There’s now an effort to determine do we or don’t we have any of these.”

That brand-new effort is being led by the USFW, which as recently as six months ago would not even discuss the topic of cougar sightings. Apparently, times have changed. Now the agency is not ruling out an Eastern cougar comeback, and is reviewing scientific and commercial information to determine the status of the Eastern cougar. The study is being conducted out of the USFW’s Northeast Regional Office, right down the road in Hadley, the first study of its type since 1982. Back then, field researcher Virginia Fifield was stationed in the Happy Valley to investigate cougar sightings. She investigated many and confirmed one track in the Goshen State Forest mud.

If a thorough investigation is conducted, it’ll be interesting to follow … very much so.

Interesting observation from a recent coastal Maine transplant with Connecticut Valley roots — an upright lady and former Recorder scribe with no reason for or history of, um, lying. But what the new South Amherst resident witnessed definitely left an impression. She was stunned.

The sighting occurred on a Sunday-afternoon drive with her 13-year-old son; traveling north on Amherst’s Northeast Street, perhaps a mile from the Main Street intersection — from the sounds of it, not far from the estate of Stan and Dot Gawle of Shelburne fame. Following a BMW Z3 convertible with its top down on a pleasant fall day, the mother and son caught something out of the corner of their eyes, a large animal bounding through farmland on the east side of the road and racing across the road, forcing the Beemer to pull to right and stop to avoid hitting it. Once safely across the road, the critter moved through farmland on the west side of the road, toward UMass’ Fraternity/Sorority Park, before disappearing over a rise and into a patch of woods.

Yep, you guessed it, another Eastern cougar sighting, this one not 10 miles as a crow flies from the Quabbin Reservation, where documented cougar evidence was confirmed in 1990s. The woman figures she had six seconds to study the animal, “long enough to really stare,” and what she saw was incredible.

“It was a tannish/light-brown animal about 7-8 feet long — maybe a little longer?? — including tail, which was outstretched and long,” she wrote in an e-mail. “The animal was maybe three feet tall, but outstretched and running, so hard to tell.”

She went on to describe the creature as having a “cat-like profile on its head with some kind of darker coloring edging the face, but I was focused on the length so didn’t look closely at that. It had a taut body with a shape that reminded me of a small lion.”

Admittedly no wildlife expert, she assumed at first she must have seen a bobcat but was troubled by that identification, so much so that she decided to do some online research upon returning home. She pulled up pictures and “realized that what I saw didn’t look a thing like a bobcat — wrong coloring, no stripes, way too big, no fluffy face — so I checked out profiles of cougars and — bingo! — that was it.” She called to her son for confirmation and he agreed they had seen a cougar.

Like many others, our latest witness took it upon herself to report the sighting to “a state wildlife office, and they could not have been less interested. I didn’t mention I saw it about a mile or two from two elementary schools.”

You get the feeling that one of these days the authorities will have no choice but to accept such a sighting as real. It’ll probably require a road-kill, and even then they’ll write it off as an escaped pet.

This witness described what she saw as exciting, and although she’d be the first to admit her limited wildlife acumen, “I know it was no damn house cat or dog.”