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.”

A local realtor chimed in on cougars after a recent report of a Colrain sighting. The man made his first Ashfield home in an area I’m quite familiar with after decades of hunting, hiking and four-wheeling through a forest wonderland where kindred spirits beckon. Apparently, he felt as though he’d bitten his tongue long enough.

He began his short e-mail note by identifying his town of residence and admitting “I have been reading your (cougar) columns these past few months in earnest.” He closed by stating, “Just thought I’d add fuel to the fire!” The information sandwiched between those bookends is what’s important.

The first mention our latest source heard of cougars was shortly after he settled in Ashfield during the late 1970s, when United States Fish & Wildlife Service wildlife specialist Virginia Fifield was stationed here to investigate cougar sightings. The new Franklin County resident asked a neighboring landowner across the street for permission to cross-country ski through his pasture. Displaying the country spirit that once prevailed throughout our western hilltowns, the neighbor said he had no problem sharing his land for such activity but cautioned him about the cougar tracks he’d found there.

Hmmmmmm? That got the West County transplant thinking, and probably kept him alert, particularly when swallowed by the mixed woods he often exercised in. Then, during the mid-80s, there it was: moving, breathing evidence; a big cat in the Hawley State Forest. No, he hadn’t sampled any tiny florescent mushrooms gathered from the wet, shaded forest floor. Quite the contrary, he was mountain biking with friends before they “saw this long, slinky animal with a long tail cross the road. Not a coyote.”

Like most people confronted with such a sighting, they didn’t make a big deal of it; probably because they didn’t want to be accused of lying or, at the very least, experiencing a Sixties flashback right out of the Timothy Leary playbook. Who in their right mind would willingly cast such aspersions on themselves?

Must be that newspaper reports caught him at a perfect time to pry free a disclosure, although you’ll notice he hasn’t been identified. No, he didn’t say he wanted to remain anonymous, but he didn’t give the green light to use his name, either; and when discussing a potentially controversial subject like cougar sightings, I always err on the side of caution.

Undoubtedly what nudged the note out of this source was “a few recent mountain lion sightings crossing Route 112 (in Ashfield) and a recent discussion he had with a hilltown octogenarian from Goshen, the site of the only confirmed cougar track found by Fifield during her stay. The soon-to-be 90-year-old man attended the source’s daylily open garden and, out of the blue, started discussing mountain lion sightings in his neighborhood.

“He lives in Goshen, just south of the DAR (State Forest, where the Fifield-confirmed track was found),” reported the realtor. “He claims to have plaster casts of prints, lots of neighbor sightings and has talked to several wildlife folks.”

Huh? Is the man crazy? Eighty-something and talking to wildlife officials about mountain lion sightings? Doesn’t he know state officials are mandated reporters? What’s he after, an evaluation? Psychoanalysis? Shock treatment? A rehabilitation center, perhaps? Doesn’t he know it’s irresponsible to report cougar sightings, that Eastern cougars are extinct?

Apparently, at his peril, he ain’t buying it. After nearly a century on God’s earth, he’s learned to trust his eyes.

Not wanting to “beat a dead horse,” I had stopped reporting about Pioneer Valley mountain lion, or cougar, sightings by the late 1980s. Well, that horse has sprung to life, so I think I’ll ride it and see where it takes me.

Yeah, I’m fully prepared for accusations from wildlife officials that I’m being “irresponsible” for bringing the controversial subject back to light. But, hey, I’m in the news business and they seem to be in the business of sweeping this story under the carpet. In fact, that’s why I backed off nearly two decades ago, after reporting several local cougar sightings and discussing them with experts at the state level. The explicit instructions were to back off before I stirred up big-cat hysteria.

These same people who favored the “conservative approach” admitted that many of the cougar sightings had been made by “straight shooters” with no reputation for spinning yarns. Thus, there was no reason to doubt them. Nonetheless, the experts said, the sightings did not prove the existence of a reproductive population of big cats in New England, where they indisputably roamed during the first two centuries of settlement. More likely was a scenario by which someone had purchased a young cougar, run into problems controlling it and illegally released it. And, of course, there was always the possibility that “roamers,” probably young males from Great Lakes territory and beyond, had passed through the area in wanderlust, seeking out new territory.

Although both theories are certainly possible, perhaps even probable, from my perspective it doesn’t really matter where the big cats are coming from. The point is they’re being spotted throughout the Northeast, and have been for a generation.

Who cares if there isn’t a “reproductive population” at the present time. That’s not the issue. There wasn’t a reproductive moose population here 25 years ago, either, just sightings. But now a native population has been established, and it’s not uncommon to see a cow and her calves in a Franklin County pasture. Moose returned with the reforestation of southern New England and so have black bears. So what’s to prevent big cats from repopulating the region? That’s the question, and there appears to be no valid explanation why it can’t happen, if it hasn’t already, in the hinterlands of northern New England. So if there are indeed cougars among us, how long before they’re here to stay? Ten years? Twenty-five? No one knows.

Since a discussion began in this space a few weeks ago, I have received a lot of feedback, more than I could possibly present in one column, most by eye witnesses, one by a professional doubting Thomas I have great respect for. In fact, just a couple of minutes ago the Greenfield Postmaster was in my yard and he told me of a friend who’d made a plaster mold of a cougar track he discovered in Brimfield. On Saturday, I had another local man in my home, showing me sharp photos of a cougar track he found in a Shelburne orchard. That’s how wild this big-cat chase has gotten. They’re coming out of the woodwork. So, I’ll have to piecemeal the information I receive until it dries up, as I assume it will. But you never know, it may snowball.

This week we’ll focus on an interesting phone call I received a week ago, midafternoon. The man on the other end was Mike Pekarski, calling from his family’s smokehouse on Route 116 in Deerfield. He had a tale to tell. A good one.

Before I continue, it’s important to disclose that Pekarski and I have had many wildlife discussions over the past decade while I was shopping at his store, but he never told me he’d seen a big cat up close and personal. What made it even more intriguing was the site of his observation. Why? Because it was less than a mile from the tracks, big around as a softball, I witnessed in fresh snow with my own brown eyes during the most-recent shotgun deer season.

Pekarski’s story takes place on opening day of the 2003 shotgun deer season. I will not disclose the location other than to say it was in Conway, not far from the Deerfield River. Pekarski arrived at dawn and intended to sit it out till dark if necessary.

After arriving at his stand, secluded motionless behind a large hemlock atop a ledge for about three hours, Pekarski detected movement coming his way at 9 a.m., 9:30. As the animal approached, he realized he was watching something special. A big cat.

Totally unaware of the hunter’s presence, the cat walked to within 15 or 20 yards of Pekarski and stopped, providing a clear, unobstructed view for a frozen period of time he described as the longest 30 seconds of his life.

“It was the color of a manila folder, except for its black snout, and its head was big as a volleyball,” he recalled. “It was so close that I could see its whiskers. Finally, it looked up at the ledge, we met eyes and it turned and bounded out of sight. Its tail was long, probably 15 to 18 inches.”

Pekarski said the animal’s shoulders were wider than his rottweiller/husky mix dog’s, its track wider than his fist. If you’ve never met Pekarski, take it from one who has: He carries a pretty good set of meat hooks around with him.

“It was head and shoulders over any coyote; longer, too,” he said. “Minimum of  80 pounds.”

Not wanting to create a public spectacle, Pekarski has been selective, if not secretive,  about sharing his sighting. But he did run it by a couple of Environmental Police Officers, who paid close attention.

“They told me anything’s possible,” he said.

Anything, that is, except hallucinations.

As wildlife officials steadfastly dismiss Northeastern cougar sightings as misidentifications and mirages, big-cat witnesses keep coming forward from the Carolinas to Canada’s Maritime Provinces. And despite what the experts say, accepted Eastern cougar evidence has been gathered in the region, some as close as the Quabbin Reservation and the Goshen State Forest. So, although any reasonable investigator would admit there have been innocent misidentifications as well as intentional cougar hoaxes, it’s impossible to totally deny that big cats could make a comeback in New England, due to reforestation and the steady increase of our whitetail-deer density. Cougars gravitate to regions with high deer densities.

This week, the seventh straight we’ve devoted to cougar talk, let’s focus on a couple of specific topics: 1.) the potential presence of cougars in the Quabbin wilderness and 2.) the curious number of black-panther sightings, given that Eastern cougars are not supposed to be black. I’ve fielded a couple of e-mails from Quabbin-area eyewitnesses, which should not be shocking news in light of the fact that a sample gathered on that state reservation in 1997 was scientifically identified as cougar scat. Also, two credible 1956 sightings of a black panther by local residents have been reported here, one in Athol, the other in Montague. So it’s worthy of further discussion.

First, the Quabbin, where Kenneth Matthews had a tale to tell on a handwritten letter. Matthews lives on Wheeler Avenue in Orange and identifies himself as “a farmer, hunter, trapper and lumberman.” At age 92, he says “he still hunts and keeps a good garden.” Sounds legit.

His story goes back 30 years, to the mid-1970s, when he was on his way to work about a mile inside Gate 35 at the Quabbin. “I saw five deer cross the road in front of me and not more than 10 yards behind them were two of these large cats. They were dark brown; the larger one was sort of blackish on the shoulders, neck and head. I would estimate their weight at between 80 and 120 pounds. I have seen their tracks since then while fishing in Warwick.”

Another sighting not far from Matthews’ but a generation earlier was reported by Sterling Clark, who sent an e-mail about a big-cat sighting by he and his parents on Route 202 heading toward New Salem. “Probably 50 years, ago my parents and I were returning from Worcester on Route 122 and turned left onto Route 202. In a desolate area of that highway, before reaching New Salem, a huge cat bounded out of the woods on what would be the Quabbin area side, ran across the road in front of our car and bounded up a steep bank and out of sight like it was nothing. … It’s a sight I’ll never forget.”

Although the Eastern Cougar Foundation — “a non-profit, science-based, volunteer-run organization dedicated to recovery of cougars as the top predators in eastern North America” — does not accept sightings as evidence, it was involved in the aforementioned 1997 Quabbin scat-identification process. The sample was gathered by animal tracker John McCarter in April 1997 and tested first by George Amato of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, then by Dr. Melanie Culver of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Both scientific studies, relying on DNA analysis, identified the sample as cougar scat. Fecal analysis determined the cat had eaten a beaver.

Hmmmmm? Indisputable evidence, right?

Not so fast.

Although a November 2000 MassWildlife press release acknowledged the scat had been deposited at the Quabbin by a “free-ranging animal and not placed there as part of some elaborate hoax,” spokeswoman Susan Langlois would not accept the possibility that it had been dropped by a “wild” cougar.

“Since there has been no additional hard evidence collected in the ensuing three years, the escape or release theory looms,” she said. “One could speculate that a captive cougar escaped or was released in the area and survived long enough to feed on a beaver and leave this tangible evidence of its presence.”

The Quabbin sample identified as cougar scat is one of four confirmed Northeastern scat samples found since 1992 and listed on the Eastern Cougar Foundation’s Web site. Two of the others were discovered in Canada — one in central New Brunswick in 1992, the other in Ontario in 1999 — while the fourth was recovered by Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department agents around Craftsbury. The Foundation also lists the 1976 killing of a male cougar that had killed sheep, then the capture of a pregnant female two days later in Pocahontas County, W.V. Confirmed tracks have been identified since 1990 in Virginia, Maine and West Virginia. Around 1990, a track left in a Goshen State Forest mud puddle was identified as a “suspected” cougar track by wildlife biologist Virginia Fifield, then stationed in the Pioneer Valley to investigate cougar sightings.

Do we really need more evidence that cougars exist on the Eastern Seaboard? Depends on who you’re talking to. But at the very least it is appropriate to discuss the topic.

As for the discussion of black panthers in the Northeast, well, that gets a little sketchier. According to experts, black cougars or panthers are found only in South America, not North America, where cougars have tan coats with tints ranging from yellowish to reddish to grayish. That said, “sightings” of large black cats are not unusual in the Northeast, including the two 1956 reports chronicled here recently.

Sightings of big black cats are also common in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, according to Mark Pulsifer, author of “The Eastern Cougar in Nova Scotia,” an article published in the 1992 Summer/Fall issue of “Conservation,” the official publication of Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources. Pulsifer found Nova Scotia cougar sightings to be quite consistent, as nearly all witnesses reported seeing a large feline animal, “tawny to black in color with a long, curved tail. Of special interest is the unusually high number of black or melanistic cougars reported in the province. Black cougars have been reported 42 times in Nova Scotia and 49 times in New Brunswick. In South America, where the black form is endemic, it is considered very rare. This unusually high rate of observed melanism in Nova Scotia has led some to suspect that the dark coloration of these animals is due to back lighting and/or the result of a wet pelt.”

Can there be any doubt there have been additional black-panther sightings reported in the Maritime Provinces since Pulsifer’s article appeared 14 years ago? Take it to the bank — just one more fascinating element of the cougar discussion that makes it captivating.

The fact is that little is known of the Eastern cougar because it vanished so long ago. The prevailing wisdom is that there are three species of North American cougars, the Western cougar, Eastern cougar and Florida panther. However, some scientists now believe all three may be the same species, varying in size slightly according to where they live. A rule of thumb with deer is that they get bigger the farther north they live, and the same could be true of cougars. So, perhaps the Florida panther, though slightly smaller than its supposed cousins, is the same animal. Before that question can be answered, someone’s going to have to come up with an Eastern cougar, and that has been no easy task for the past century. Some believe that day is quickly approaching; others dig in their feet and say it’ll never happen. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Said an Eastern Cougar Foundation expert: “I doudt there are any pure Eastern Cougars left.”

Sounds reasonable.

Woodsman Peter M. Falandes, a self-described “old codger” from Charlemont, chimed in about wild cats and beyond. Saying he has a good knowledge of local wildlife after spending “a lot of his life in the woods,” his typed letter touched on mountain lions and Canada lynx.

Falandes doesn’t know what the fuss is about mountain lions. They’ve been around for decades, according to him, and he has even encountered two over the years, the first while partridge hunting off Legate Hill Road in Charlemont in 1959. The animal entered a clearing on a hill and, unaware of Falandes’ presence, walked to within 12 yards of him before detecting him. It then spun 90 degrees and “ambled off into the scrub pine.”

“As I was armed with bird shot, I did not consider shooting at this lion unless it made a hostile move,” he wrote; and there was no need to when the animal fled. … There was another close-range sighting of a lion shortly after this incident.”

Falandes’ second cat sighting occurred in 1982, in the middle of Lenox Swamp, also in Charlemont, but he didn’t go into the details. He did, however, give his assessment of the big-cat situation.

“Due to the lack of constant signs and/or sightings,” he wrote, “I think the lions are few in number with a large range, at least at this time.”

As for Lynx, Falandes has a more recent encounter to share, again in Charlemont, while hunting with a scoped rifle during the 2005 bobcat season. “I observed what I initially thought was a large bobcat but when I put the crosshairs on it, I realized it was a lynx,” he wrote. “The lynx was in the open and I was using a 6X scope at approximately 75 years, so there was mistake in identity. … A friend of mine had the exact same occurrence, only at closer range in Buckland.

I myself  experienced a similar sighting while sitting motionless in a deer stand overlooking a ravine across the street from my home eight or 10 years ago. I noticed movement along a stonewall and, once it got close enough, positively identified it as the largest bobcat I have seen. It stood perhaps 20 inches at the shoulder, long-legged like my male Springer Spaniel. In fact I have described it several times since as the size of 42-pound Ringo. I have seen several bobcats since, none approaching that size, but thought it could have been a large male like the 38-pounder I saw Conway trapper Eddie Rose carrying out of the woods along the Whately/Williamsburg line many years ago. After reading the description of lynx in a recent Vermont Fish & Game Department press release, it occurred to me that the animal I saw could have been and probably was a wayward lynx.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Here I go again, chasing ghosts, some tan, others darker, all with long, sloping tails bowed to the ground. Many credible sources claim to have seen these creatures in the area. Experts say they’re mistaken. So who do you believe — the credentialed ones who say cougars are extinct but can’t prove it, or honest citizens who report seeing them? It’s a quandary. Flip a coin. That’s about where we now sit.

More fuel for the fire was mailed to me by reader Bernice Brooks of Leyden. She clipped a Feb 15 “USA Today” article and sent it along thinking it may be of interest. The headline read “Central USA seeing mountain lion migrations: States long devoid of cougars find evidence of cats coming to stay.” The story discussed recent cougar migration to Midwestern states where they disappeared a century or more ago, at least that’s the official line. We’re talking about states like Nebraska, Arkansas, Illinois and Wisconsin; another not mentioned in the article but included in similar discussions is Michigan, where cougar sightings have increased dramatically over the past decade in remote Great Lakes country. So, the simple question is this: If the experts now agree that cougars are re-established within a day’s drive, why not here? Why not in the Adirondacks, the Greens, the Whites? Why not in the Poconos? It’s a question the most outspoken “ghost busters” don’t want to entertain, never mind attempt to answer. But the fact remains that, similar to here, witnesses in the five aforementioned Midwestern states had for years been reporting cougar sightings to a chorus of ridicule from experts, credentialed and otherwise. You know the line: “Another cougar sighting? What was he or she smoking? Ha-ha-ha.” Well, apparently the laughter has quieted in the heartland, where the same experts who 10 years ago denied the validity of cougar sightings now say there is indeed a resident cougar population. Sound familiar? It should. The same thing happened a generation ago in Florida, where people reported panther sightings and were informed by wildlife officials that it was impossible, Florida Panthers were extinct. They’re singing a different tune today, with a viable, reproductive panther population lurking in Sunshine State swamps.

Imagine that. Florida panthers weren’t extinct after all. Hmmm? Wonder why they insisted they were, why they refused to admit even the most remote possibility they were back? I guess they’d have to answer that. Now a similar scenario in the Midwest, where the well-intentioned fellas with patches on their shirts admit big cats back. At first they identified confirmed sightings as escaped exotic pets, then young, wayward males displaced by territorial adults in the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming. And who’s to say that wasn’t the case. But now the explanation’s changed. Wayward females have entered the formula as well, and we all know what comes next. Yep, you’ve guessed it … kittens, like the immature cougar spotted 50 miles southwest of Milwaukee and confirmed by DNA testing to be a cougar. So it looks like what’s happening there is exactly what the experts said could not happen there, in Florida a generation earlier, or in the Northeast now. And do you want to hear a good one? There’s information “out there” that experts aren’t even sure Eastern and Western cougars are different species, perhaps only a variation of the same.

All I can say is this: Believe what you want but be very careful what you say in public, who you criticize, how adamant you are in your opposition, because your day of reckoning could be near. And when that day arrives and these sightings can no longer be dismissed as escaped pets, LSD flashbacks or delusions, the experts with the gilt-framed degrees hanging behind their desks will have some explaining to do. Lights, camera, action, it’ll be there on the 6 o’clock news, in print, on-line. Backpedaling experts will be scurrying to defend their earlier opinions, stuttering, stammering, excuse after excuse, in disbelief that the information they pulled out of a book somewhere was wrong. It’ll be pure entertainment for me and other idiots. Comic relief.

There is a way for the fellas to escape this potential future indignity. Seems pretty simple from this perch. All they have to do is admit they can’t be certain Eastern cougars were ever extinct.

That way, they’re covered.

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 20^th 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?