Mountain lions are probably around here, but are they really the wild kind?
by Joe Tarr
Rebecca Shiflett was driving along toward the Sugarlands Visitor Center one morning in May 2002, just before 6:30.
A nature photographer, Shiflett has driven and walked all over the Smokies at all hours of the day, and she's encountered all kinds of wildlife, but she was about to see something she'd never seen before and probably never will again.
It was off the side of the road as she came around the last curve before the visitors' center.
"In the middle of May, you have pretty good light that time of day," she says. "I slowed down immediately. Where I saw him was a game trail. I regularly see deer or turkey or coyotes there. He was standing five feet off the pavement in the mote area, looking at me. I say 'he,' he could have been a 'she,' I don't know."
The animal was about as tall as a coyote, weighing perhaps 75 pounds. Its fur was taupe colored, and it had a rounded head.
"I saw the animal for several seconds. She just stood there looking at me. When I got about 50 yards of her, she just walked off into the woods," says Shiflett, whose cameras were locked in the back of her car. "There was no mistaking what she was."
What it obviously was, to Shiflett, was a cougar. Her first reaction wasn't terror or glee, but embarrassment.
A friend of many of the park's biologists and rangers, Shiflett knew the controversy surrounding these animals. "I felt like a fool in a lot of ways because I knew if I saw her I had to report her," she says. "When I saw it, it wasn't like 'Wow, cool,' it was like, 'Now I've got to tell somebody.'"
She reported her sighting to Kim Delozier, the park's head wildlife biologist. "He told me there had been one or two other sightings in the area," she says.
Long considered extinct in the Eastern United States (except for Florida), cougars continue to be spotted all over, including in East Tennessee.
Yet there's no conclusive evidence that the animals exist as a natural, viable population. Biologists dismiss most sightings as misidentifications and believe the genuine cougars found in the East are escaped pets.
But sightings have been on the rise, with thousands of people believing they've seen mountain lions in the wild. The reports of panthers in the Smoky Mountains are becoming more frequent, and there've even been pictures taken of what look like cougars in Cades Cove.
"It's kind of an elusive thing. A lot of people say they've seen them," says Bill Stiver, a biologist with the Smoky Mountains National Park. "I'm not here to tell them they didn't."
Whether the animals are phantoms, lost pets, or the real deal—well, it might take years to sort that out. And by then it might be a moot question. Whether they're here or not, many biologists think it's only a matter of time before cougars return to the East on their own.
Known Population
Mojave is eating too fast, crunching a chicken breast in his jaws, huffing and grunting as he glances up nervously. He's 14 months old and weighs about 100 pounds, and he isn't crazy about people watching him eat. His "mom," Jennifer Arp, coos at him from outside his cage, but it's three men next to her who probably trouble him the most. After he finishes his chicken and beef, he's more relaxed, and Arp reaches into the cage, where she pries back his gums and shows off his teeth.
Arp raised Mojave from a cub at Tiger Haven in Kingston, where there are more than a dozen cougars. The cat used to live in her trailer at the refuge, now he stays in a pen right next to it and watches TV through the window in her bedroom.
Tiger Haven is a refuge for big cats of all stripes—animals that were private pets or kept at malls, stores and other strange places—that would otherwise be killed. Altogether they've got more than 100 big cats, including several lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, lynx, a jaguar and bobcat, among others. (The jaguar once lived in the Southern Appalachians but went extinct 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. The remains of one were found in a cave near Chattanooga and are kept at UT's McClung Museum.)
The animals at the haven are never sold or bred, and when they die they're cremated and buried here. They've got a cougar here that was being kept at a strip club, shocked with a cattle prod to give out a scream when one of the dancers began her routine. The club decided to give up the animal when it took off five fingers one day, earning the cat the nickname "digit."
"When I came here to work I wanted to work with tigers. Cougars were my least favorite," Arp says. But after being around them, she became infatuated. "I love their personalities, I love the noises they make," she says.
Arp approaches the pen of Kip, who is making a soft deep meow sound. "Right now Kip's saying, 'Where's my food?'" An older cat with a vasectomy, Kip is kept in a pen with Katy. "[Katy] will drive you crazy with all the noise she makes. She'll announce to everyone that she's ready when she's in heat," Arp says.
In many ways, they act just like very large house cats, but they can make for lethal pets.
Western cougars can weigh more than 200 pounds. The smaller eastern cougars get to be only about 150 pounds. They're solitary animals and eat mostly large game, especially deer. "They can take down humans pretty easily. They can take down elk," Arp says. "But when they see humans, it's not something they see as food." (Wild cougars have killed humans, but it's rare—only 11 people died from attacks in North America between 1900 and 1995. Dogs kill far more people than mountain lions.)
"Anything young, weak, sick or old," is ideal prey, Arp says. "They don't like to be injured. If you fight them back [fiercely] they will back off," she says. The animals are stealth hunters, attacking from behind. They can climb trees, but they don't typically hunt out of them. The males are very territorial.
The folks at Tiger Haven don't have any trouble believing there are mountain lions in the Appalachian woods. "They can adapt to any environment. They live in the desert, they live in the snow. They can live anywhere," Arp says. "I would think a place like the Smokies is the perfect place for them."
Ken Roberts, who started Tiger Haven, also believes they're out there. "Technically, they don't exist in the wild around here. Personally, I'm not so sure of that. I've never seen one, but I've heard them scream in the wild," says Roberts. "They do have a rather identifiable scream. I know it's clichéd, but it sounds like a girl child screaming."
Actually, the cougar scream is often confused with that of bobcats. But having spent his life around large cats of all kinds, Roberts isn't exactly a novice. "I'm a bit leery of saying I've definitely heard them screaming in the wild. I've heard cats screaming in the wild, and they sounded like cougar. Some other cats scream, especially when they're in heat, but they're not nearly as high pitched as the cougar could go," he says.
On the Rebound
They're known by many names—cougars, panthers, puma, painters, mountain lions, catamounts—but they're essentially the same animal, with about 20 subspecies. At one time, it was the farthest-reaching animal in America, stretching from the Yukon all the way through South America. It can live in just about any climate—desert, mountain, swamp, forest—provided there's plenty of space, large game and cover.
Cougars started dwindling in the Eastern United States as soon as Europeans settled here. Their habitat and food sources were diminished when forests were converted for agriculture, says Mark Dowling, one of the founders of the Eastern Cougar Network. By 1900 the animals were extinct in most Northeastern states, although exact dates are hard to pinpoint. They survived a little longer in the Southeast.
Their decline coincided with the reduction of another mammal in the East—the white tail deer, which were a main food source. In southern Florida, a population of panthers managed to survive, because the area remained relatively unpopulated until recently and because there are wild pigs they can eat.
A cougar was killed last in the Smoky Mountains in 1920. Throughout the United States that cat was considered vermin until into the 1960s and '70s.
The animals continued to survive out West, although their numbers were diminished. With protection in recent decades, cougar populations have been making a comeback, and their range is creeping east.
And more and more people say they've seen them in places like the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. "There have been reports, probably forever, of people seeing cougars in the park," says Donald Linzey, a biologist at Wytheville Community College, who has done research in the Smokies for almost 40 years. "Since 1990, the reports really have increased in number.... We get most of our reports around Cades Cove; second most is Sugarlands Visitor Center."
There have been nine reports this year, including one from a Memphis couple who took a picture of a cougar in Cades Cove in June. They sent Linzey a copy. "It is a cougar. There's really no question about it," he says. The animal was walking along the side of the road around 9:30 a.m., he says. The picture is in profile as it walks off the road, just inside the woods. (Linzey did not want to reveal the identity of the couple to Metro Pulse, and the park workers didn't know them.)
Linzey also has a copy of a video of a cougar shot outside the park in 2001. He investigates each panther sighting, interviewing whomever made the report and examining whatever evidence they might have. "About 40 percent of them I think have some validity to them," he says of the reports. Many of them do sound credible. One account came from a veterinarian who has treated cougars before. Another came from a maintenance worker.
In the past couple of years, the park has been undergoing the All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, an attempt to catalogue every single life form in the Smokies. It's an ambitious effort—one that's never been completed anywhere on this scale.
Linzey is overseeing the mammal portion of the study. He's made a concerted effort to answer the question once and for all whether cougars exist here. So far he's come up empty-handed in terms of hard evidence.
He's set up several hair snares through the park. The snares are scented pieces of carpet with small nails attached to them, hung on trees, a few feet off the ground. When an animal smells it, the hope is it'll rub up against it, leaving hairs, which are then analyzed. So far the 55 snares in the park have collected hairs of deer, coyote, red fox, gray fox and bear—but no cougar.
There are also two infra-red motion cameras, but again, they haven't caught any cougar on film.
He won't speculate on whether the animals people are seeing could be released pets or remnants of the original population or animals that have migrated from out west or from Florida—the three most popular theories.
"Some people want to believe there's still a remnant of the original population," he says. "There's really not much way to prove that. The park position is that the animals are either escaped or released," he says.
Linzey believes the Southern Appalachians could support mountain lions. "I think the area is suitable now. Back around 1900, the deer population was almost gone. Since that time, we now have national parks and national forests, plus the deer population has come back," he says. "The factors are suitable for them living here."
Park biologist Stiver is non-judgmental about all the reports of mountain lions. "I have never seen one. Of course, I wouldn't have believed we had capuchin monkeys here, but we caught a capuchin monkey. I've handled monkeys, emus, goats, peacocks, declawed bears. The list of unusual animals we've handled goes on and on. But we've never handled a mountain lion.... But if somebody told me there was monkey here, I'd say they were crazy too. And we've had a monkey show up."
Mistaken Identity
Darrell Land has what he believes is a full-proof test for knowing whether cougars—or any other variety of animal—are living in an area. "You'd be guaranteed to be encountering them dead along the highways. It's the best sampling method. It's in operation 24-7," Land says. "That's one of the most classic signs of a population of animals."
Land is an expert on the Florida panthers, a mountain lion subspecies that has managed to survive. They're endangered there, with fewer than a 100 animals living in the large, undeveloped swampland of southwest Florida. Even with such a small population in an area with few roads, one to 10 of the cats end up as roadkill each year. "Pull out a map of Tennessee and North Carolina and look at all the opportunities where cats have to cross roads and think about how large their ranges are. It's only a matter of time [before one gets hit by a car]," Land says.
The fact that there haven't been any dead cats found suggests there isn't a breeding population here, he says.
Land is one of many biologists skeptical of the reports of panthers in the East. They don't dispute that there is an occasional cougar found in the woods here. But they believe they're mostly escaped or released pets, or perhaps more rarely, a cat that has wandered here from out west. They think most so-called cougar sightings are something else.
"Almost all of [the sightings] are mistaken identities, ranging from house cats to bobcats," Land says. "People want to believe what they saw is mysterious and exciting."
"They're not looking at the science of it, but what they wish were the case," he adds. "Some people still want to believe in UFOs and the Abominable Snowman and Elvis might still be alive, too."
Dowling founded the Eastern Cougar Network with three other men last year to compile any evidence it could of cougars in the East. The network considers a dead animal, a verifiable photograph, and DNA evidence (collected hairs) as proof of cougar. Scat, tracks or a kill verified by a professional, or a sighting by a wildlife biologist are considered strong evidence. It doesn't consider sightings from the general public.
"We're convinced, and I think most state game people are convinced, that the vast, vast majority of cougar sightings are something else. Even biologists can make mistakes. A 30-pound bobcat can look like a cougar," Dowling says. "I've been sent pictures by people thinking they've seen a cougar, and it was a common house cat.... It's a problem of scale. People's eyes play tricks on them."
The group's website—www.easterncougarnet.org—has a detailed map of the East and Midwest of all confirmations, probable evidence and evidence pending confirmation. In the Southeast, there have been three confirmations in Florida (outside the Florida panther's range). There was also an eight-pound cougar kitten killed in Floyd County, Ky., that same year, and a cast taken in West Virginia.
Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officer Mike Bailey made a plaster cast of a large track in Marion County in September 1997, after there had been reports of a cougar in the area. The state's biologist determined it was a large cat, probably cougar. (Another biologist disagreed.) Bailey says there was also a cougar killed in the '70s in Pikeville.
But overall, there's not enough evidence to suggest a population, Dowling says.
"We have no evidence of a breeding population in the Appalachians. We have very little evidence of cougars confirmed. We're not saying there aren't cougars, but there's no evidence," Dowling says.
"When you think about how popular hunting is. Every year you have millions of people out hunting. You've got thousands in deer stands, and people running dogs. If there's a population out there, you're going to get documented evidence," he says. "The ones out west get treed by dogs. Sometimes they've been known to attack domestic animals or kill deer in people's backyards. If you've got a population of large predators, you're going to know about it. They kill 60 deer a year."
Still, many people do keep seeing them. Not everyone believes cougars spotted in the East could be renegade pets. "If they're surviving in the wild, they're probably not a released pet," Tiger Haven's Roberts says. "They don't have the hunting skills. They'd either starve to death or get so crazed with hunger that they'd go in among people. These cats, while they do have a great deal of instinct, they don't just know how to hunt. They have to be taught. If one of our pets saw a cow walking around, they would not relate that cow with their dinner."
Arp disagrees some. She says the cougars at Tiger Haven often kill possums, squirrels, and raccoons that get into their pens. "It's not that they wouldn't be able to survive. They'd be shot and killed," Arp says. "These cats aren't afraid of people. When they see people, they think they have food. They're familiar with us, so they don't see us as a threat."
Dowling also disagrees. He says there have been a number of pets that have lived in the wild for extended periods of time. One declawed animal was just shot in Ohio. In Florida, a pet escaped and was recaptured after six months. It still had its collar on. And it's estimated that there are thousands of cougars kept as pets in the United States.
The other theory is that some of the cats seen in the East are transient males who have wandered from the West or perhaps from Florida.
The farther west you go on the Eastern Cougar Network's map, the denser the dots marking evidence of cougar get. There are several in Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Nebraska and the Dakotas. Many biologists think it's only a matter of time before the panthers creep farther and farther east.
Cougars have been known to travel hundreds of miles. Adult males aren't tolerated in the territory of another male. So when cubs come of age, they usually wander quite far. Perhaps for that reason, you're seeing the mountain lions expand their range into the Midwestern states. "It would be conceivable that a western cat could show up in Tennessee," says Dowling, but he adds, "it's extremely unlikely."
"These big cats, there's no doubt in my mind they're out there," says Bailey, the TWRA officer who made a cast six years ago. "People will get the things as a kitten when they're real fun. The next thing they get 15 or 20 pounds and they're tearing clothes and it costs $15 a day to feed them. A lot of times they'll just turn them loose. There's enough of these reports that come in from reliable people that tell me we've got a couple of them out there."
What They Saw
It was 15 years ago, but R. Lewis Hodge remembers every detail. He and his wife were driving through Cades Cove and had turned onto Sharp's Lane, driving out into the middle of the Cove. When they came over a small hill, they saw a mountain lion.
"We cleared the hill, and just as we did there was a cougar out in the middle of the road. My wife and I, there's no question in our minds," Hodge says. It stood about table high, and had sandy gray fur, about the tone of a Hush Puppy shoe. It acted very much like a cat.
A UT education professor, Hodge has spent his life making observations in classrooms, and he says he's good at collecting important details. There was strong wind blowing into the Hodges that day, so it took the animal a moment to notice their car.
"As soon as he saw us he immediately took flight. It was all so fluid. The whole body just leaped from about the middle of the road to the embankment. It was one of those thrilling moments.... At once you want to roll up the windows and lock the doors because it's lethal; and you want to run after it. Of course, running after it would have been futile. It was gone.
"There was no question this was a cougar. It could not have been anything else. We're not 99 percent certain—we're certain," he says.
Mountain lion skeptics are fond of discounting the thousands of cougar sightings by noting there have been thousands of Elvis sightings over the years. But Hodge has a different analogy. He compares the animals to a well-known human fugitive, Eric Rudolph. "The fact that a human can hide out from all the law enforcement agencies and the dogs for two or three years, certainly an animal like a cougar could do that," Hodge says.
"The things are really good hunters, and they're good at not being hunted. The vegetation around here is thick enough for them to avoid being sighted easily," he says.
"My wife and I both thought it was a privilege to sight a cougar. There's an excitement to seeing something people wonder if they exist. This was our opportunity to say, 'Yep, they really are here. If you just keep an eye out, you'll see some unusual things."
January 2, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 1
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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