March 05, 2010
By Peter Marteka,
Nature's Path & Way To Go
The e-mail came with a subject line "mountain lions in New York." As fast as I could I opened the file, and there they stood: three magnificent cougars, pumas, catamounts, ghost cats — whatever you want to call them — with their sleek bodies and tawny coats standing out in the deep snow next to a car.
Then I glanced at the headlines beneath the photos. "This is why my wife refuses to go start my truck in the morning." I rolled my eyes. "These were taken this past weekend outside of Corning, N.Y." Uh-huh. Right. Yet another hoax — proven by the fact the truck seen in one of the pictures had a Colorado plate.
the East Granby Board of Education had a warning on its website about a mountain lion. "Caution. Mountain lion sighting. Just a quick FYI, a mountain lion was seen crossing the driveway at the entrance to Allgrove School. All administrators have been notified to exercise caution." I had to call to get more information.
"It was reported by someone as some sort of a cat," said First Selectman James M. Hayden. "Are there mountain lions out here? Where the town campus is, there is a quarry, and then that backs up to many acres of open land. It was going from one spot to another."
According to Paul Rego, a wildlife biologist at the state Department of Environmental Protection, there have been numerous bobcat sightings in the Granby area. He said when people think they've seen a mountain lion — which disappeared from New England in Colonial days — it is usually a case of mistaken identification. Rego said what people actually spot are coyotes and bobcats, or sometimes even large dogs. Rego said there is no wild, self-sustaining population of mountain lions — also called cougars — in the state, although some illegally kept animals have been captured over the years.
"These e-mails and warnings seem to give verification when it is not necessarily the case," he said. "We have seen nothing that would verify its presence in the state or really anywhere in the Northeast."
One group, Friends of Connecticut Mountain Lion or "Cougars of the Valley," offers a $50 reward for anyone who takes a photo of the animal at a verified location within the state. The reward may be unclaimed for a while, with the nearest breeding populations out West and in Florida. The western cougar is moving east, Rego admitted, but only into places like Nebraska and Minnesota.
