A good argument for allowing open carry in Virginia's National Parks.
Cougar comeback?For animals deemed extinct in Virginia, the cats sure get around
BY REX SPRINGSTON
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Mar 31, 2005
Carrying his .50-caliber black-powder rifle, Gilbert Dance of Colonial Heights went deer hunting last fall along the Nottoway River in Sussex County.
Dance, a retired produce dealer, was walking along a path through the thick forest when he stepped into a small clearing beside a swamp.
A big predatory cat, a cougar, joined him there, Dance said.
"When I stepped into that opening, he stepped out of the swamp on the other side, no more than about 25 steps from me. I looked at him, and he looked at me."
Dance, 73, said he began to move his rifle off his shoulder in case the animal threatened him. "When I did that, he just turned and went down into the swamp."
Dance said he recognized the cougar because he had seen two while hunting elk in Colorado a few years ago.
Slightly lighter in color than a deer, this animal stood 2½ to 3 feet tall, about 5 feet long nose to rear, with a tail about 3 feet long, Dance said.
"I wouldn't have been any more shocked if I had seen an elephant standing there."
The cougar occupies a special place in American lore. The fourth-largest cat in the world, it thrived from the frigid Yukon to the tip of South America. Cougars prowled nearly all of the United States below Canada, and all of Virginia from mountain forests to coastal swamps.
Settlers feared the powerful cat, which could reach nearly 9 feet in length, weigh 200 pounds and leap 15 feet up into a tree. They hated its awful cry, said to sound like a wailing woman. In addition to cougar, they called it mountain lion, puma, panther, painter and, appropriately enough today, ghost cat.
Worried humans shot the cats as vermin. They aimed to wipe them out, and in the East they did a fine job. Today about 100 cougars cling to existence in southern Florida. In the rest of the East, they are officially considered extinct.
The last wild cougar confirmed in Virginia was killed in Washington County in 1882.
But are they really gone? More than 500 people have reported see ing cougars in Virginia since 1978. Similar reports pour in across the East. For the most part, they are as well-documented as sightings of Bigfoot and Elvis.
But tantalizing developments -- a road-killed cougar kitten in Kentucky, a track deemed real in West Virginia -- lead many cougar sleuths to conclude that the mountain lion, like the truth, is really out there.
"The argument has moved from whether there are any out there, which always used to be denied by the wildlife establishment, to: Where are these cougars coming from?" said Chris Bolgiano, a Rockingham County author who has written extensively about the cats.
Bolgiano sees three possibilities:
* Some captive cats have escaped or been released.
* Some wild cougars migrated from populations to the West or South.
* Mountain lions never were truly extinguished in the East.
"My own feeling is we probably have all three, and they are probably mixing" in the wild, Bolgiano said.
Mike Fies, a state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist, said he tries to keep an open mind but has yet to see evidence that cougars roam Virginia.
"It's amazing how many people have supposedly seen them, yet nobody can document it . . . A lot of people claim to have seen UFOs, too."
He added, "I think the people truly believe that's what they saw. I don't think they're making up stories. I just think they're mistaken.
"As many people as we have out in the woods, as many dogs that are out there in bear season, and raccoon hunters, somewhere down the line somebody would tree one. One would end up getting shot."
Bobcat
Recent efforts to photograph cougars with heat-and motion-sensitive cameras in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and in West Virginia's backwoods got lots of shots of bobcats, raccoons, coyotes and other creatures, but no cougars.
Many credible people, including some park employees, have reported seeing cougars in Shenandoah, said park biologist Jim Atkinson. "It has proven to be a very elusive creature."
Rick Reynolds, another state game department biologist, is Virginia's official cougar report taker. The job resembles chasing fairies.
In his office near Staunton, Reynolds sat at his computer and brought up a picture of a tawny cat, taken at Wintergreen. At first glance, the animal looked like a cougar.
But after Reynolds pointed out the size of the leaves around it, the animal looked no bigger than a bobcat or large housecat.
In Reynolds' computer and in his paper file on the big felines, the story repeats itself over and over.
"No one has really demonstrated, number one, that we even have individuals out there, let alone a population," Reynolds said.
Reynolds' wife, Sally, reported seeing a cougar along a road near Wintergreen in 2001. A camera buff, she failed to get a picture.
After the proper, "Yes, dear, yes my beloved," Reynolds said wryly, "I just kind of took the information and entered it into my record."
. . .
On a clear winter day about 10 years ago, Loyd Tanner Jr. of South Hill was driving through a wooded stretch of Mecklenburg
County, headed to a field trial for beagles.
He slowed down to cross a bumpy bridge. As he was crossing, he said, an animal popped out of the woods about 30 yards away.
Tanner, 71, a retired federal mechanic, thought the animal was a dog. But when it got closer, he said, he realized it was a cougar.
"He ran right across in front of me, within less than a car length from my truck. And I sat there and watched him go probably 30 or 40 yards, running down through the woods, until he disappeared.
"He was a big thing. He probably weighed 60 to 70 pounds, at least. . . . It certainly was not a bobcat. I know what a bobcat looks like. He's stumpy and blocky and short with a nub tail."
Tanner said he didn't realize a cougar sighting was that unusual.
"So I went up to the beagle club and told the boys I'd seen a cougar. They looked at me with a blank stare, like they thought I was crazy."
. . .
Even the ghost cat gets caught sometimes.
Fies, the state biologist, responded
about 15 years ago to a report of a cougar harassing wildlife near the Shenandoah Valley community of Grottoes.
Figuring he was on another wild-goose chase, Fies looked under the low deck of a house where the culprit supposedly was hiding.
"I took my flashlight and shined it under there. Sure enough, there was a mountain lion under the deck."
It turned out that two cougars, kept in captivity nearby, had gotten out. The one under the deck was subdued with a tranquilizer dart. The other was caught in a nonlethal trap near Harrisonburg.
The animals were returned, and no charges were filed because the owner had permits, Fies said.
In 1996, Todd Lester, a West Virginia coal miner and amateur cougar sleuth, made a plaster cast of a footprint from southern West Virginia. Lee Fitzhugh, a wildlife biologist at the University of California at Davis, identified it as the print of a cougar.
In eastern Kentucky in 1997, a man in a pickup truck hit and killed a cougar kitten. DNA analysis showed South American heritage, indicating the kitten was the offspring of a captive.
If people are seeing cougars, they probably are seeing escaped or released captives, said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Diana Weaver.
"We just get so many reports, my personal feeling is some people have undoubtedly seen something that could be a cougar."
Who keeps pet cougars?
A surprising number of people, said Mark Jenkins, director of the Cooper's Rock Mountain Lion Sanctuary outside Morgantown, W.Va. It is one of about a half-dozen sanctuaries in the country that take unwanted or neglected cougars.
"I've been open seven years, and I turn down an average of one a month," Jenkins said. "It's just ridiculous."
Some people breed cougars and sell them through magazine ads and the Internet, Jenkins said. He has seen a kitten advertised as low as $50.
Owners often find they can't control the animal when it grows up.
"This cat is a 200-pound machine that can kill an 800-pound elk," Jenkins said. "You want to keep one for a pet?"
In most states it is legal to keep pet cougars, Jenkins said. It is illegal in Virginia, but zoos can keep them with federal and state permits.
. . .
Janice Carter's small dog was disemboweled this last fall on Carter's 72-acre spread in Amherst County.
Later, something killed a neighbor's two dogs. Then an animal left what looked like claw marks on one of Carter's horses.
One evening, Carter, a 54-year-old contractor, was in her truck when she saw what looked like a big cat by a lake. She saw only its tail "and a little bit of butt."
One night in mid-December, she was coming up her 1½-mile driveway when, she said, she spotted a big cat walking in front of her about 100 feet away.
Carter backed up a hill so she could fix her headlights on the animal, which was moving away.
"It was very definitely a mountain lion. It did not run at the speed of lightning to get away. It just kind of moseyed on back in the woods."
. . .
Four hundred years ago, Virginia was home to wolves, elk, buffalo and towering virgin forests. We tamed them, along with the mountain lion.
Anyone with a few molecules of romance surely enjoys the notion that some native cougars survived against all odds in the remaining pockets of Eastern wilderness.
"There are people in the backwoods who are surprised when you mention that cougars were shot out, that they are gone," said Bolgiano, the author in Rockingham. "So it's possible there were a few left that made it."
Donald W. Linzey, a Wytheville Community College biologist, would like to see the cougar come back for ecological reasons.
A missing part of the Eastern wilds, the predator would help keep deer numbers in check.
Some people fear cougars, but Linzey said their threat is minuscule even in the West, where they inhabit about a dozen states.
In the United States and Canada, cougars have killed an estimated 18 people since 1970. Their favorite food, deer, kill about 200 people a year in car collisions in the United States.
"Cougars are solitary animals," Linzey said. "They don't want to be around people."
They just want to drive us crazy.
Contact Rex Springston at (804) 649-6453 or
rspringston@timesdispatch.comhttp://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD/MGArticle/RTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031781870917&path=!health!healthology&s=1045855935235
