http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/view/letters/6574968.html
Myths, misconceptions about mountain lions
Kennebec Journal” 07/10/2009
While the June 24 newspaper report of a possible mountain lion sighted in Winslow, and your follow-up editorial are encouraging to cougar enthusiasts throughout the East, I would like to address several omissions and errors.
The article mentioned two Maine confirmations, one in 1938, and another in 1995. A mother and kitten were sighted in Monmouth, and their tracks confirmed by Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife biologist Keel Kemper in September of 2000 http://www.cougarnet.org/northeast- desc/9-00.htm — the last mountain lion confirmation in the northeastern United States. The story also cited Iowa and Michigan as the source of the closest breeding populations. While sub-adult cougars dispersing east from breeding populations in the Dakotas have appeared in the Midwest, there is no evidence yet of breeding occurring in the central US.
In the last decade, at least 12 confirmations have been documented in eastern Canada. Half of the DNA gleaned from these confirmations has been Latin American — cougars bred for the exotic pet trade. Former captives, indeed, are the likely source for Provincial cougars. However, while we anticipate that they might be sending pioneers into Maine, there is simply not enough evidence to suggest a breeding population.
We await eagerly the results of the Winslow scat analysis, and hope that both your readers and state wildlife officials adopt the spirit of your editorial, one that will embrace and return this very essence of “wild” to the wilds of the Northeast.
Christopher Spatz, President
Eastern Cougar Foundation, www.easterncougar.org
Rosendale, N.Y.
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http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/columns/6528374.html
Kennebec Journal – Morning Sentinel
COULD IT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN A MOUNTAIN LION?
06/27/2009
Every once in a while, wildness erupts into our tame daily lives. And it’s thrilling.
For some, that wildness comes via a rollicking paddle down Class V whitewater, just on the edge of losing control to the river’s superior power. For others, it’s the feeling you can get from a skiing briskly down a steep black diamond run, trees just a blur on either side.
And for a family in Winslow, this week’s eruption of wildness came via their sighting of a tail bobbing in the ferns and brush at the edge of their yard.
That tail, about 3 feet long, had a dark brown tip. It was attached to a four-legged beast with a large, cat-like face, yellow eyes and huge paws. It looked like it weighed around 130 pounds.
A mountain lion.
Or at least, what sounds like a mountain lion to state wildlife official Wally Jakubas, a biologist, who is also investigating another recently reported sighting in northern Augusta.
There have been other mountain lion reports in Maine, a couple of dozen every year. And most of them don’t pan out. The eastern mountain lion, or cougar, which once inhabited the landscape of eastern North America from Canada to Florida, was hunted to local extinction by the late 1880s.
The New York Times reported in 1993 that a hunter Downeast witnessed a fight in the woods between what he believed to be a bobcat and a cougar. But that was never confirmed. The only confirmed cases were in 1938 near the Maine-Quebec border and in 1995 in Cape Elizabeth.
So Jakubas will look into the two sightings from the last two weeks. He will likely find that they weren’t mountain lions.
Our hope is that he won’t be able to definitively determine what was roaming around in the woods of central Maine. Then, we’ll be allowed to keep the dreamy thrill that one of the wildest things ever to roam these parts still exists and will, when we least expect it, emerge from the woods to make our hearts beat faster.