Introduction

Lord of the Forest

Cougars, Cougars Everywhere

From 'Endangered' to 'Limbo'

Great Escapes: The Abitibi Cougar

Do Cougars Eat People?

Curiosity About the Cat

What do you Think?

Early in this decade, two events occurred which should have provided answers once and for all to the question of whether cougars inhabit the Maritimes.

An adult western cougar at the West Virginia Wildlife Center at French Creek, West Virginia (Photo - Todd Lester, Eastern Cougar Research Center).

In the spring of 1990, a man named Roger Noble videotaped a large, long-tailed cat lurking near his home in Waasis, not far from the city of Fredericton. Cougar advocate Ted Reed of New Hampshire declared the video was proof positive and called on the New Brunswick government to establish an eastern cougar sanctuary. He and other U.S. cougar experts held information sessions in several New Brunswick towns.

Then, in November 1992, another exciting chase produced even more
apparently solid evidence. A forest technician alerted provincial biologist Rod Cumberland to a trail of fresh tracks in the snow left by a large catlike animal, about 70 miles north of where Roger Noble videotaped his cougar. With wildlife technician Jeff Dempsey, Cumberland followed the trail for several kilometers, taking detailed measurements. The tracks averaged four inches in diameter. The stride was too long for a bobcat or coyote.

They never found the cat, but they did collect a scat containing traces of
hair the cat licked off during grooming. The scat was shipped to the
Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa for analysis. In February 1993,
Cumberland was told the hairs found in the scat were from a cougar.

For believers, the videotape and confirmed cougar scat were proof the
eastern cougar was still here. Not so for wildlife biologists.

The Waasis video has produced more disagreement than certainty. The animal in the video looks and moves like a cougar, but it's hard to say how big it is.

"I looked at every single frame of that tape with (zoologist) Don McAlpine at the New Brunswick Museum," says Fred Scott. "We were both convinced that it was a much larger animal than a house cat, although it didn't appear to be as large as a full-grown cougar."

The scat may have contained cougar hair, but it still remains to be proven that it was an eastern cougar. Rod Cumberland himself believes it was an escaped pet. In his opinion, the 1992 chase proved nothing.

"People call it a sighting, but the people didn't actually see the animal,"
Cumberland says. "Typically, when people sight an animal, they don't see a cougar."

If these questions bedevil the reliable reports, what of the dozens of
cougar sightings reported yearly?

The Canadian Wildlife Service collected cougar sightings up until about two years ago, when it became a provincial responsibility. The federal agency has handed all its cougar data over to wildlife branches in each province.

In Nova Scotia, species-at-risk biologist Mark Elderkin oversees the status of all wild animals in the province for the Department of Natural
Resources. Part of his job is to collect eastern cougar sightings and
analyze any hard information. The department has recently issued a policy bulletin on investigating cougar sightings which includes a detailed reporting form.

Copies of the form are circulated to district offices, and the completed
forms returned to Elderkin's desk in Kentville. The information is entered
into a database, and then sent to be archived at the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax. On-site field checks are done when there is likely something to find.

Elderkin says at least four field checks have been done by district offices in the last year, none of which turned up physical evidence.

The database, which tracks variables such as fur color, size estimate and so on, allows biologists to look for patterns in such things as geographic orientation of sightings or what seasons of the year cougars are being seen.

In neighboring New Brunswick, provincial Natural Resources staff have
organized their reporting system in such a way that their dealings with
cougars are kept to a minimum. Someone who claims to have seen a cougar is asked to fill out a standard report form. Natural Resources tallies up the completed forms it receives via its district offices and then sends them on to the New Brunswick Museum for filing.

Normally, a district ranger or warden will make a first assessment of the
report, Rod Cumberland says. Credible sightings are passed on to a regional wildlife biologist who will attempt a field observation to look for tracks or scats. If the biologist makes a find, he notifies Natural Resources headquarters staff, who make another assessment -- a rare event, Cumberland says.

In fact, barely a tenth of reports make it past the first assessment. A
report may be labelled false if the animal is black (almost certainly a
dark-colored mammal called a fisher), or if the description sounds like it
was lifted out of an identification guide (exact measurements and use of
the unfamiliar word "tawny" are giveaways).

Nova Scotians do no better.

"If you go through the cougar reports extant, it's very easy to peel off,
in round figures, about 60 percent of them that are clearly misidentifications," says Mark Elderkin.

Elderkin tells a story he feels illustrates how unreliable the general
public is. He was working for the Canadian Wildlife Service back around
1983, and Gerry Parker was his boss. Parker called Elderkin into his office saying he had something he wanted Elderkin to listen to.

A woman had called to say she had a cougar in her backyard, "caterwauling" every night. She had taped the screams.

"So I listened to this tape," Elderkin says. "I said to Gerry, 'Give me
five minutes and I'll come back and give you my identification'." Working
on bird surveys at the time, Elderkin went down to the CWS lab and pulled out several taped bird calls.

"I narrowed it down very quickly to an immature great horned owl or an
immature barn owl," he says, adding that the two sound remarkably cat-like. He phoned the woman and got her to listen to the owls sounds, without saying what they were.

"Without even any hesitation she said, 'Oh yes, that's it, that's the cougar'."

Stories like this have made skeptics out of otherwise objective wildlife
biologists such as Rod Cumberland. Once a convinced believer in the Waasis video, Cumberland has seen enough negative evidence to switch sides.

In late August, the media were all abuzz with the story that a city cop in
Saint John, New Brunswick had seen a cougar with three kittens cross the road in front of his car.

"All of a sudden there's cougars in the province again," Cumberland
complains. "When you look at the sighting report, he never even saw the
bottom half of the animal, he never saw a long tail or anything." Two scats collected from the area turned out to be from other species.

"I ran after cougars for seven years here with the department, and every
stinking time it turned out to be something other than a cougar. Everything from house cats to black bears to fisher to bobcats to coyotes," he says.

But what about the few sightings that are credible? Mark Elderkin says
about 30 percent of sightings get the tail length and color right and can't
be dismissed as clear misidentifications. The top ten percent of reports
come from knowledgeable observers, biologists in some cases, and are "very, very convincing," Elderkin says.

"The only snag in the entire works is that in years and years of follow- ups that have been done with many of these observations, there has been no physical evidence of any sort to support or refute what the observer has seen," he says. "No tracks. No scat. Nothing."

Barry Sabean agrees: "It's hard to imagine that we could have a breeding population of animals here and some hunter hasn't shot one, or some trapper hasn't trapped one, or some houndsman hasn't chased one up a tree, or somebody hasn't run over one with a Mack truck."

Fred Scott, now retired after 30 years with the Nova Scotia Museum of
Natural History, takes a more optimistic view. He says the lack of evidence only proves there's a lack of evidence.

"There have been no records of road kills in New Brunswick or Quebec, but we have concrete evidence of cougars from there, so absence of road kills doesn't prove anything. In fact all it proves is that no road kills are recorded." In Nova Scotia, he reminds us, there have been four recorded road collisions, including the report that begins this story.

Sure, many sightings are false, but it is also possible there have been
more cougar sightings in recent years simply because there are more
cougars. The only sure thing is that there isn't enough information.

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