Pennsylvania Lion Hunt
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on October 8th, 2006
Lion hunt: State probes area sightings of big cats
Officials skeptical of reports of mountain lions say people likely are seeing some other kind of cat.
By Tom Venesky
Chuck Litwin Jr. knows what he saw. He just can’t believe it.
It was 9 a.m. Sept. 16. Litwin was driving his truck on state Route 92 about a mile outside of Nicholson heading toward Tunkhannock when he saw it.
“It was a mountain lion. It walked out real slow across the road about 20 feet in front of my truck,” Litwin said. “It took its time and didn’t care I was there, and then it walked into a cornfield.
“It reminded me of something you would see on the Discovery Channel.”
Litwin, who is a hunter, said he got a good look at the animal as it walked in front of him. The details he provided – long tail, golden color, etc., are prevalent in a growing number of alleged mountain lion sightings received by the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
But the agency remains steadfast in its stance that a wild, breeding population of mountain lions does not exist in the state. Commission spokesman Jerry Feaser said that if there’s a mountain lion in the Pennsylvania countryside, it’s one that was illegally released from captivity.
“There are people who believe they saw a mountain lion. We don’t question their integrity, but we truly believe it’s simply a case of mistaken identity,” Feaser said.
Still, he acknowledged that the commission is receiving more reports of sightings in recent months. As a result, the agency is establishing a protocol for handling alleged mountain lion sightings to efficiently document and tabulate each instance, unfounded or not.
“If we get a call and someone says they are looking at a mountain lion out their back window, we’ll send an officer right away,” Feaser said. “We’ll look into firsthand information and try to give it a timely response.”
Litwin contacted the commission’s Northeast Region Office in Dallas after his sighting. Wildlife Conservation Officer Victor Rosa, who covers Susquehanna County, responded.
“I went out to the location and couldn’t confirm any tracks,” Rosa said. “I’m not saying he didn’t see anything, because I wasn’t there at the time.”
Feaser said most of the calls reporting mountain lions turn out to be bobcats, fishers or extremely large housecats. Many people catch a fleeting glimpse of an animal and assume it’s a mountain lion, he said, and it turns out to be a bobcat or coyote.
That’s not to say there haven’t been mountain lions roaming the state in the last decade. Feaser said a mountain lion escaped captivity in Delaware County 10 years ago and was recovered some time later. In 2002, the commission cited a Dauphin County resident for keeping a mountain lion inside his apartment.
There are residents permitted by the commission to keep mountain lions, but the agency keeps strict tabs on each case.
“If the animal dies or is sold, they have to document that to us,” Feaser said. “We want to know what they did with it and, if it escaped, we want to know immediately.”
Feaser stressed the agency would never issue a permit for a mountain lion’s release and doesn’t support any re-introduction plans because the state is too densely populated.
Most of the mountain lion reports come from the Northcentral and Northeast regions, he said.
Rosa gets 30 to 40 calls a year from people reporting a mountain lion sighting. He’s received calls of horses being attacked and calves being killed (bears were the culprit), and even an instance of black panthers roaming the county.
Rosa listens to every call, responds to those that are timely and tells everyone to keep a camera handy so there’s evidence.
Still, there’s one fact that has Rosa question the validity of wild mountain lions existing in his district.
“I get calls all year except winter, when there’s snow on the ground. If there was a sighting in winter, the cat would leave tracks in the snow,” Rosa said. “But that is the only time of year when we don’t get calls.
“When I was an officer in Monroe County several years ago, I had a call for tracks in the snow and it turned out to be a bobcat.”
According to Rosa, the state’s burgeoning bobcat population may be to blame for the increase in supposed mountain lion sightings.
It’s proven that bobcats are expanding their range and increasing, and Rosa reasons that more people are actually seeing large male bobcats and not mountain lions.
Litwin, however, said he knows the difference between the two. What he saw on that lonesome stretch of Route 92 two weeks ago wasn’t a bobcat, he said.
“It was right in the middle of the road, 20 feet in front of me walking slowly,” he said. “It was huge, maybe 6 feet long not including the tail. It took eight or nine steps and it was across the road.
“I never thought I’d see something like that around here.”
Source: Wilkes-Barre Times Leader
Why are wildlife officials so adamant that a breeding population of these big cats doesn’t exist?
I imagine that they would also say the same thing for Bigfoot. 
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Why did it take a few decades for authorities to admit eastern coyotes exist?
I expect they figure the public can’t handle the truth.
I can believe people confusing a lynnx and a bobcat, but a mountain lion?
I guess anything is possible.
I can attest to mountain lions in NH, I personally witnessed one.
I was bowhunting in the early 80’s and was following a well worn deer trail.
Apparently this animal was sleeping and I got to within 25-30 feet from it, before it broke from the cover it was in.
Never seen one since and I’ve spent thousands of hours in the woods.
We’ve followed nineteen-inch, three-toed biped tracks for hours thru the deep wilds of northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, across roads, pastures and rural yards, thru parks and chicken coops and up your street, so big cats in East Coast woods? Feh!
I live near the reported sighting of the mountain lion and I can say that more and more of my friends and acquaintances have witnessed mountain lions in this area. The people I know, for the most part, are life time hunters and have either shot, trapped or observed every kind of animal reported to live in this part of the country. There is no way they are all misidentifying a mountain lion with a coyote, bobcat, fischer or bear. I know of people who have observed mountain lions through spotting scopes and are 100% sure of what they were looking at.
Like cryptid sightings, most of the reports I hear about are never reported to the Game Commission. I wouldn’t doubt a relocation program as I have heard claims of Game Commissioners picking up a road-kill mountain lion, a tracking chip removed from a shot lion, and a lion being transported into PA by out of state game wardens.
Unfortunately, in Pennsylvania, there are a lot of political ties between the Game Commission, politicians and the forestry industry. It behooves the forest industry to limit the deer population and with the reintegration of the natural predator it seems pretty cut and dry what’s going on.
Probably just a pea hen.
I don’t know where they get off saying Pennsylvania is too densely populated. I used to live there folks. Sure there are some large cities but it’s a Huge state and there are huge tracts of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited lands. I find it hard to believe someone could confuse a bobcat with a cougar, never minding the size difference, bobcats are colored differently and plus have no tail, while cougars are well known for their distinctive tails. The game wardens are going to have to suck it up and add wild cougars back to the list of the living.
Western mountain lions have been expanding their range eastward into the Great Plains for the past ten years. They can travel 200 miles a month when foraging and have been documented in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana. Last time I checked, The Penn State is only a few days trek from Hoosierville. In ten years they will be found up and down the Appalachians. Go Cougars!
I do not believe that pumas ever became extinct in the East. They were nearly exterminated, but not completely. Sure, a lot of the sightings over the years have been misidentifications, wishful thinking, or outright lies. And some of the sightings have been of pet pumas that escaped. But come ON! If all of the pumas that people have seen in the East have been escaped pets, then there are an awful lot of pet pumas around!
I personally have only ever met one pet puma. But I did see a wild one once, out around Cave Run Lake in Kentucky. At the risk of sounding like an eminent hominologist who posts in another blog, I know that what I saw (in Kentucky not Pennsylvania) was a puma.
My grandmother, who is 92 and has lived here in Eastern Kentucky all her life, tells me that there were pumas around here when she was a girl, and her daddy always carried an ax with him when he went to the woods to guard against them.(She calls them panthers – pronounced paint-ther). Up until about the 1950s, the mountains were kept cleared of underbrush, almost all the way to the rocky tops. But since then the forest has been allowed to return in most places, and there are deer in plenty. Elk have been reintroduced and there is a pretty sizable herd now. Coyotes are very numerous – and they are not part of the area’s original fauna. They probably fill the niche of red and gray wolves, which have not returned. There are quite a few black bears. Bobcats seem to be plentiful, although except for the occasional roadkill, or one accidentally treed by coonhunters, they are very seldom seen.
And there are pumas. Whether they are Eastern pumas recovering their numbers, or Western pumas moving East, or a combination of the two, they are here. The Appalachian Mountains are perfect puma habitat. I am sure that they see us much more often than we see them. Maybe a lot of the cats that are being seen around houses in the East are escaped captives. But those that people are occasionally seeing in the woods are wild pumas. Of that I have no doubt. The evidence is coming in, and sooner or later the naysayers will be proven wrong about the Eastern Puma.
It sounds like the wildlife authorities in Pennsylvania are pulling the same stunt that ours pulled for many years in the Province of Ontario, here in Canada.
Supposedly the last puma was shot in Ontario around 1908; and (supposedly)none were seen again until around 1986, when they started showing up quite regularly on Manitoulin Island, on Lake Huron.
Although I lived in Toronto at the time, I subscribed to both Island newspapers by mail service; and I read with delight the articles on cougars that appeared with regularity for several weeks.
Then the articles suddenly ceased and no further word was heard for a good decade or more; as if a muzzle had been quietly applied.
Finally the Ontario government had to fess up and the public was ‘officially’ informed of the return of cougars to Ontario more than a decade later, some time around 1998.
It is also worth noting that our neighboring Province of Quebec, just east of Ontario, adopted the same ‘silent treatment’ until cougars were likewise declared resident there around 2002.
I believe that government authorities tend to tread very softly on the cougar issue, in an effort to head off/muzzle dreaded public hysteria. Who knows where such a political directive would come from? I’m sure no officials would care to admit to it.
But I would point out that the reaction of the Manitoulin Islanders in 1986 was swift on behalf of the safety of their school children. Right away they began building enclosed shelters at the ends of their long rural driveways so that the children could wait for the school buses in safety, without fear of cougar attack. The ubiquitous presence of black bears and wolves in the same area since time out of mind had never before prompted the Islanders to build protective shelters for their children.
Since then the Province of Manitoba (west of Ontario) has also had to fess up. It now looks like cougars are pretty much ‘officially’ re-established throughout most of central Canada.
Therefore, I can’t think of one good reason why cougars would not have already re-established themselves as well, directly south of us, throughout central and eastern America.
But CAUTION – many of the authorities are still not ‘with the program’, so to speak.
As a case in point, last year I naively wandered into our metropolitan police station to inquire about predatory cat sightings in the area, some of which had made it into the local media news; one in particular with video. WOW! What a mistake that was!
The officer at the front desk shouted at me about as loudly as he could – so that everyone could hear – “Are you on crack?!! You must be on crack! Are you on crack”?
Suffice it to say that I departed hencewith forth forever with my tail between my legs.
Got cougars, you say? Just keep it quiet. Maybe they’ll just go away.
“Why are wildlife officials so adamant that a breeding population of these big cats doesn’t exist?”
It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and something only city slickers will swallow.
In Appalachia, they KNOW that the cougars never went away. Maybe the wildlife folks think their denial’s protection. If so, it’s hard to understand why they’d claim it was just escaped or released cats.
Really!?
The cougar has been sighted in New York State as well. Hopefully, the eastern race remained genetically intact and will once again be established as a sub Species.
Well I live in PA and I don’t believe anything the Game Commission says. But I am only a senior citizen that has hunted and I have a pretty good idea of what is here and not.
I’d think a hunter would know the difference between a mountain lion and a bobcat or coyote. Also, if everyone is misidentifying it, why are there not lots of mountain lion sightings wherever coyotes and bobcats exist? Something is going on there.
I too live in PA, in the Poconos and while new homes and developments are popping up all over there are still HUGE tracts of natural land that is untouched. I can, quite literally, look out my bedroom window and catch racoons, groundhogs, the odd black bear and either a feral dog or small coyote (he doesn’t come far enough out of the brush until well past dark) and I live a stone’s throw from Jim Thorpe.
I have not seen a mountain lion personally, but to be honest it wouldn’t surprise me if a breeding population exists in PA. I’ve heard of all sorts of sightings of both mammals and birds coming from the ‘black forest’ area of PA. And the Lenape have many interesting stories and folk tales about both natural and supernatural entities in the area.
I think that there has always been a small population of pumas along the entire length of the Appalachians. The population became very sparse and fragmented during the mid-twentieth century, but they never disappeared entirely. And now the numbers are increasing again.
I guess, to do them credit, part of the secrecy on the part of official state agencies might have to do with wanting to have a management plan in place before announcing that pumas are “officially” part of their fauna again. And, just maybe, to prevent gung-ho Nimrods from going out to the forests and blasting away at everything that remotely resembles a puma before the puma population has an opportunity to increase. But maybe I am giving the agencies too much credit there.
Yeah, I would like to think that the agencies would be giving consideration to these points, but my gut instinct tells me you are giving them too much credit. In big agencies like this with so many cogs going, I just feels it is very hard to keep big secrets of this magnitude. I am just not a big conspiracy theorist kind of guy. Maybe I’m being too harsh on them, but in my experience, this kind of carefully thought out foresight by these agencies to protect this species just seems to be a little too good to believe. Hope I’m wrong, though.
My gut feeling is to agree with you on that point, mystery_man . But an old hippie like myself has to harbor SOME hope for the existence of a utopian society LOL !
Guess you don’t need my two cents, eh?
I don’t think more unscientific scientists exist than the ones staffing state natural resource and game boards. I wouldn’t believe them if they told me raccoons existed while I was looking at one. (I’d have to just believe my own eyes.)
I said it on another thread. One thing I’ll never believe is an authority — particularly a scientific one, particularly a scientific political authority — telling me never.
Wonder how many Eastern lions there are? I’m guessing in the 500 – 1000 range. Minimum. Come up with a conservation plan already.
Although I will say this about their motivation to keep it quiet. Never overestimate the intelligence or the rationality of the public.