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?

If you look at a recently-prepared map of cougar sightings in the Maritime provinces, you'll notice a five-pointed star marking a spot in southwestern Nova Scotia. More than a hundred dots and squares mark the sites of "possible" and "probable" cougar sightings, but that star stands alone. It signifies a "virtually certain" sighting of a cougar.

"I can still remember it very clearly. I just couldn't believe what we were looking at." - Finn Bower, Lower Ohio, Shelburne County (September, 1998).

It happened on a late October day in 1985. As the sun was going down, Finn Bower was driving Highway 103 along the South Shore, leaving Shelburne County to visit relatives in Lunenburg. Her husband Brian was sleeping in the front passenger seat and their teenage son Andy sat in the back.

While passing through a wooded area, Finn suddenly heard a clunk and felt the force of an impact through the steering wheel. She looked in the
rear-view mirror and saw what she thought was a person lying on the road. Brian awoke, and Finn stopped to back up the car.

Instead of a person, they found a large, long-tailed cat, twitching but
unconscious. Its fur was the color of a deer's, and the body was about five to six feet long, as measured against the back bumper of Finn's car.
Assuming it was dead, Brian and Andy dragged it into the ditch.

"They picked it up by the fore and hind paws, with its long tail dragging
on the ground, and moved it off the road," remembers Fred Scott, who was then a mammalogist at the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax.

When the Bowers returned the next day, the animal was gone. Finn reported the incident to Scott, who believes it is the most credible cougar report in the province to date.

Little is known about the eastern cougar. One of the few things everyone
agrees on is that, before the arrival of Europeans, cougars prospered
wherever there was habitat for their principle food, the white-tailed deer.
In the 1700s and 1800s, European settlers in eastern Canada and the U.S. cut the forests down and decimated the deer. Some animals such as raccoon and fox benefited from the new spaces created by the expansion of agriculture, but the cougar did not.

What's more, people feared and hated this perceived threat to livestock and humans. Often encouraged by the offer of bounties, they set about
eradicating cougars. By the early to mid-1800s, cougars were already rare in New England.

Today, the only known populations of cougars are the mountain lions of
British Columbia and the U.S. west coast, and a handful of panthers in
Florida. The three animals -- Florida panther, mountain lion and eastern
cougar -- are all of one species. In fact, they are considered by many
biologists to be practically identical.

The eastern cougar was first identified as a subspecies in 1946. Working with the remnants of the once proud cat -- dusty specimens stored in museums and other institutions -- Stanley Young and Arthur Goldman grouped all known cougars into one genus, *Felis*, and one species, *concolor*. (*Felis concolor* means "cat of one color.") But they also identified 30 sub-species, 14 of which are (or were) found in North America. Only two were located east of the Mississippi -- the Florida panther and the eastern cougar.

Based on an examination of rather few and often poorly-mounted specimens, Young and Goldman described the eastern cougar as medium-sized and reddish with a dark dorsal stripe.

While cougars were apparently abundant all along the Appalachians in the U.S., there is no clear record of the cougar's history in Canada's maritime provinces. Historical accounts are conflicting and inconclusive.

Some of these accounts are included in a new book by writer and retired
wildlife research biologist Gerry Parker. "The Eastern Panther: Mystery Cat of the Appalachians" was published by Nimbus early this summer. Parker says earlier books on the subject were written by ardent believers who were out to prove the eastern cougar still exists.

"I felt it was better to take the other tack," Parker says. "I just let the
readers draw their own conclusion."

A self-described "optimistic fence-sitter" on the subject of the eastern
cougar, Parker spent more than two years investigating the mystery in the U.S. states east of the Mississippi River and in the Maritimes. He was also professionally involved in the collection of sightings in the
Maritimes from 1977 to 1984.

He says old tales of hunting and fishing trips in the New Brunswick
backwoods make frequent references to cougars. Young and Goldman, however, found only one reliable historical reference of a cougar in the province, he says.

Neighboring Nova Scotia may have been devoid of cougars through much of its history, says Barry Sabean, director of the province's wildlife division.

"In Nova Scotia, not a single cougar has ever been documented, period," Sabean says. Due to climate changes, there were no white-tailed deer in the province from around 1350 to the turn of the last century, and thus no cougars.

But in our own time, apparent sightings of cougars abound in the Maritimes, and so do the theories to explain them.

Some people believe cougars are here and forming breeding populations. It has been suggested the Maritimes are the last wilderness sanctuary for the cougar in the east. The skeptics say that's impossible. Who's right?

[Back] [Next]

info@outdoorns.com

Designed & maintained by Outdoor Nova Scotia, Liverpool, N.S. BOT 1KO
Material protected by copyright. Last revised: December 29, 2001