Cougars everywhere. Everybody’s seeing them. Aliens. Bigfoot. Just the whole thing,” said Tom French, the assistant director of the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, which has been forced to address the concerns. “In this case, though, there’s a portion of it that’s reality.”

French doesn’t believe a mountain lion, also known as a cougar, is stalking Winchester. The evidence, he said, leaves “absolutely no uncertainty” that the mysterious animal leaving tracks in the snow recently is either a coyote or a dog. But the possibility is not the stuff of myth: Mountain lions and wolves—large predators—are indeed starting to make inroads into New England. “They really are here sometimes,” French said. And experts believe that within a decade or two the animals, which disappeared from Massachusetts more than 150 years ago, could be back in much larger numbers.

The eastern border of the range of mountain lions is moving progressively more and more east, and it’s only a matter of time until it reaches all the way to the East Coast,” said Noah Charney, a wildlife ecologist and animal tracking expert who has worked with the state Natural Heritage and Endangered Species program for the past seven years. “I sort of suspect that all of a sudden one day we’re going to know there are mountain lions here. There’s going to be no question. And it might happen really fast. It might be a family moves in, they start breeding, and within a few years, there’s a whole lot of them.”

State wildlife officials say they have policies in place in handle this eventuality. But culturally, given the recent uproar in Winchester, it’s clear we’re not entirely prepared to live once again with predators, ones our ancestors wanted to kill so badly they paid people to haul in their carcasses and cheered when they died out altogether. “Are we going to be happy about having brought them back? I don’t know,” Charney admitted. “It’s easy to love nature when it’s not scary or dangerous.”

In the Midwest, it’s already happening. Populations of mountain lions are growing and creeping ever eastward—into Nebraska, Missouri, and Wisconsin, a state that until recently hadn’t recorded cougars in more than a century. “They’re only rarely getting this far,” French said.

Still, occasional cougars from points west are beginning to visit the area. State officials confirmed the presence of a mountain lion near the Quabbin Reservoir in the late 1990s. More recently, in 2011, a mountain lion roamed Connecticut before being hit and killed by a car. This was no exotic pet: Genetic testing showed the 140-pound cat had traveled 1,500 miles from South Dakota. And on at least one other occasion in recent years, there were reports of a different predator stalking sheep in Western Massachusetts. “Lo and behold, this wasn’t a 50-pound coyote,” French said. It was an 85-pound gray wolf, proving, yes, our habitat was back, all right.

“If there were mountain lions here, they’d probably do fine,” Charney said. So now all we’re doing is just waiting for them to show up.

mountain lion sightings map

Author: mkmcst

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