It’s actually fairly reasonable to believe that mountain lions do, at least, pass through occasionally. Which brings us to the next question, what are the odds that some of these reported sightings (which, when I posted about this on twitter, I immediately started to get as well) are actually people seeing a mountain lion? It’s impossible to say, but I think the odds are pretty good that some of these sightings are legit. Having not found any evidence is not the same as saying there are no mountain lions, it’s the same as saying we don’t know. In fact, Pat Tate concedes that he’s been told of sightings from folks that he considers to be very credible, very woods savvy-people who know what a bobcat looks like-but those folks have never snapped a good photo or found a good track. This is not the same as saying that there has never been a mountain lion seen in New Hampshire. And there are thousands of mountain lions killed every year legally through hunting, and there have been untold tens of thousands of mountain lions killed by hunters over the last hundred years,” says Mark Elbroch, the Puma Program Director for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization, “So even the folks who live with mountain lions still have a fancy and see something that’s not there … to me that’s incredible.”īut Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence, Right? “There's never, ever, ever, ever been a documented case of a black mountain lion. For instance, Florida’s wildlife officials have a similar ghost cat: the black panther. Why are there so many false positives? I’d like to hazard the explanation that we really, really want to see a mountain lion. I’ve received pictures of dogs at odd angles,” says Tate. “To date most of the pictures that have been sent in have been bobcats and other species. The trouble with accepting every reported sighting as a confirmed mountain lion is that there are so many mistaken identifications. So what counts as verifiable evidence? DNA from scat or from fur, a clear track that is confirmed by an expert, or a photo that clearly shows a mountain lion. “As wildlife biologists, we’d be fascinated to say 'look. They’ve always said when we have verifiable evidence to say a mountain lion has been, is, or was in the state that we’d acknowledge that and give that information out, “ says Pat Tate, the furbearer biologist with New Hampshire Fish and Game, who insists there’s no conspiracy. “The state’s never denied mountain lions are here, and they’ve never admitted mountain lions are here. The best documentation we have in New Hampshire suggests there hasn’t been a mountain lion killed by a hunter in this state since 1885.īut if people are still seeing mountain lions, why is the state and federal government seeking to COVER IT UP!? Fish and Wildlife Service decided all of the cougars, pumas, and mountain lions in the country are actually the same species, and that species hasn’t had a breeding population anywhere near the Northeast for at least 70 years. It all used to be based on measurable physical traits - color, skull size, paw size, etc - but now it’s based on whether an animal can be shown to be genetically distinct from others. The way that we define species has undergone a revolution with the advent of DNA testing. (Cue the X-Files music: “The Government is denying the cougars exist!”) This decision was primarily for nerdy phylogeny reasons, though, because the eastern cougar probably never existed.
Gotcha, so the Deep State is suppressing mountain lion news in order to prop up New Hampshire tourism? Seems reasonable!įor starters, part of the confusion might come from the fact that the eastern cougar was taken off the endangered species list earlier this year. We speculate they don’t want us to screw up tourism… we don’t know what’s going on. But the state always denies it, and none of us know why they deny it. Lots of people have stories about them, people have them on their game cameras… I mean it’s kind of a thing.
Russ, from Sandwich (and Bedford) asks: In Sandwich New Hampshire, everybody has a story about seeing a mountain lion. Every other Friday on Morning Edition NHPR’s Sam Evans-Brown tracks down answers to questions about the environment and outdoors for our listeners in a segment we call “Ask Sam.”
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