Hillbilly Cougars
Posted by: Loren Coleman on February 10th, 2007
Eric Drummond Smith, over at Hillbilly Savants, has done a great and fair job of rounding up several recent blogs and sites about the possible survival of eastern cougars.
Hillbilly Cryptozoology: Cougars
Some folks seem to think cougars are “back” in Appalachia, either having gradually migrated from the American West or down the chain from Canada or having survived in tiny insular populations in isolated hollows or on mountaintops. As for me, well, heck, I hope they’re back, but I’m not entirely convinced yet. Yet being the operative word. That said, a whole lot of people are damned and determined to, um, determine if pumas are once more raising cubs and hunting in our mountains, people who work hard and get far less attention than they deserve – not only because I admire their work, but because it’s pretty darn interesting.Eric Drummond Smith, Hillbilly Savants
For Smith’s links to more on these eastern panther sites, click here.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
O.K. back to the fun stuff. Enough of Kentucky pancake eating contests. Yes thar r big ol’ cats in them hills. That’s the hills east of the Mississip.
The question is where did they come from, are they making little cougars and when do we have to worry if we are on the menu.
I think that Eastern cats will never be a real threat, too many hunters and good ol’ boys will keep them skittish of people, unless hunting gets banned. In the West, the opposite has occured, they have lost their fear of man, who has over the last fifty years become less of a predator in the woods and more of a recreator. Prior to the 1960’s, every human that a cat encountered was probably armed and dangerous, now were a possible snack.
Your right Joppa, now that humans (those who go into the woods with fanny packs instead of a .45 Colt) are on the menu, it is a new food source and should sustain a healthy population of big cats. I wonder how there existance will be proven maybe if one gets choked on a tofu cookie out of someone’s fanny pack, or maybe a good photo (not a blob-cat) gets taken, or how most unknown or hidden animal gets found; hunters the true masters of the forest and the only ones who seem to be interested in saving it.
I live in the easternmost county of Kentucky, wedged in about 12 miles from the West Virginia border and about 20 miles from the Virginia border. It’s steep, mountainous terrain. There are a lot of places in the Appalachians that are as wild as they have ever been. There is plenty of cover now, and there are lots of deer, and the largest elk herd east of the Mississippi. Breaks Interstate Park, the deepest canyon east of the Mississippi, is just across the Virginia border. The Daniel Boone National Forest is about 50 miles west of here in Kentucky, and the Greenbrier National Forest is about 80 miles east of here in West Virginia. People live along just about every creek and hollow, but despite that the area is sparsely populated. It’s almost made-to-order for pumas.
My grandmother says that her father never went into the hills without his ax, in case he encountered a panther. I have no doubt that there have always been pumas here, although their numbers in for the past hundred years or so have been low.
There are some photos that circulated a couple of years ago, showing a puma stalking a large whitetail buck on a reclaimed strip mine site at Wolf Creek in Martin County, KY. They supposedly were shot at night from a game camera set up on the site. To me they did not really look genuine; the puma was apparently walking sedately right behind the deer, and pumas usually stalk prey until they are several yards away and then pounce. I have not seen those photos again and I do not remember now who showed them to me. I did not pay too much attention to them because they did not look genuine.
I have a friend who is with the KY Department of Mines and Minerals who says that he saw a puma on a Martin County mine site, though, and I do believe that. (This was several years before the photos appeared.) About 15 years ago he told me that he was walking back to his truck on a dirt road on the site early one morning, and a puma walked across the road about 50 yards in front of him. I have no reason to doubt his identification of the animal as a puma. He saw its tracks in the dry dirt and said that they were about as big as a big dog’s tracks. He did not report it because, he said, every good ole boy with a shotgun would be after it. Sadly, that is probably just exactly what would happen.
I’ve talked with several people who have seen pumas in the wild in Kentucky, West Virginia, or Virginia, or at least think they have. Some of those sightings were undoubtedly misidentifications, but some clearly were not. I think that the pumas that live in Appalachia, at least in this part of Appalachia, inhabit some of the rocky outcrops on the mountaintops. It’s only a matter of time before their existence is confirmed.
Thanks for the link, ya’ll – – – I’ve been a longtime casual reader of Cryptomundo, and it made my day. More on the subject, I have several friends from West Virginia and Virginia down into North Carolina and Tennessee who claim to have encountered felines larger than a bobcat (in fact, I had dinner with a friend tonight who believed that he and a family member saw a melanistic cat in Greene County, TN). Indeed, when I was 11 and hiking in Bland County, Virginia early one evening, I came across a cat which startled me horribly – without thinking I ran into a bramble patch and hustled back to my cabin as quickly as I could. At the time I could have sworn it was a puma, but I later became convinced that it must have been the adrenelyne, my 11-year old imagination, and a vivid memory of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods “blowing up” a bobcat. Occasionally, I wonder if that was the case, or if it really was a larger cat – I remain skeptical, but would love to see cougars and other now absent large mammals (e.g. elk, bison, and wolves) return to the Appalachians.
Hillbilly Cougars? One of ’em growled and hissed at me from inside a shallow cave at the base of a cliff on a hill in Madison County, Kentucky, back in ’81 or ’82. It had caught a young vulture, still in its down, and dragged it into the cave to eat it, and I had interrupted its lunch. I didn’t believe that there were cougars in that part of the world, either, until that happened to me.
A year or two after that, one of my co-workers claimed that there had been a sighting of one on his farm along the Kentucky River in Jessamine County.
By the way I am really glad that Loren linked to Hillbilly Savants too. There is so much more to the central Appalachian region than the stereotypes.
I don’t want to get into a hunting debate here, but hunters certainly aren’t the only people interested in the woods, or saving them, and as long as pumas can be fended off by little old ladies with big sticks, I don’t see the need to be “packin'” just to enjoy the wilderness. Should one be aware of possibilities, and one’s surroundings, well certainly.
I know several hunters, as well as scores of fishermen, and am well aware that they do play an important role in securing legislation to protect wildlife, and I certainly am not about to say that there’s anything wrong in what they do, but I will always be more concerned about anyone with a gun wandering through the woods than I will anything armed with tooth and claw. Always, if only for the fact that humans are the deadliest of all animals.
One indication that there could be a large feline in the area is to check the local papers for lost pets. A dog or house cat is easy prey. My brother lost his peekapo to a bobcat here in east central Kansas. I don’t think there is cougars here but then again who knows?
Reports in rural or suburban areas of many missing or lost pets, especially cats and small dogs, are much more likely to be a sign of coyote predation than anything else.
In my community it is almost impossible to keep cats outside anymore unless you also have large dogs. When the coyotes find a place where there are cats living outside they come back again and again. The only thing that seems to deter the coyotes is the presence of dogs.
I saw a Black one, a couple of years ago. On the Scot County side of the Jefferson National Forrest. here in SW Va,tail and body lenth was at least 9 feet long. it was beautiful shiny and slick,it turned to look at the pickup i was in.it’s mouth opened i saw the white teeth ,about 20 foot in front my truck .I KNOW WHAT I SAW AT 3:30 AM THAT MORNING IN NOVEMBER