The Cougar Conundrum
by Josh Palumbo, Forest Management Coordinator
I welcome you to The Nature Foundation at Wintergreen’s attempt to bring some nature and knowledge into your home. The Nine Minute Naturalist borrows from NPR’s lovely 90-Second Naturalist podcast. Since we all have a bit more time on our hands, the goal is to take something that is happening out in our environment and stimulate your brain for roughly nine minutes. Don’t let something as “minor” as a quarantine to keep you from learning. I hope you enjoy!
The wilds of Wintergreen are home to an assortment of rarely seen wildlife. Species such as mink, spotted skunk, and flying squirrel are rarely spotted by hikers, hunters or any other outdoor recreationist, but we can verify their habitation of the land through camera traps and live traps. So how can so many people have “encountered” a mountain lion (also known as cougar, puma, panther) when no hard evidence exists for their making Wintergreen and our surrounding mountains their home? This issue of the Nine Minute Naturalist will tackle the much-debated topic of cougars in the Blue Ridge.
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (previously the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries) maintains the stance that a wild population of eastern cougar does not exist in Virginia. This stance is in direct contrast to loads of phone calls, emails and social media posts about sightings of the elusive mountain lion. At Wintergreen, we average 2-5 reports a year of claims of mountain lion with the majority coming from mountain top guests and residents. The problem lies with the lack of hard evidence. None of the reports to the DWR have been substantiated by photo, carcass or track.
This is also the problem I encounter when determining if a population exists at Wintergreen. The Nature Foundation at Wintergreen has had the honor of being a part of a couple camera trapping surveys since 2013. The first was the eMammal wildlife species survey that deployed over 20 cameras at various locations around the property for many months. The second was with Virginia Tech studying spotted skunks using baited camera locations to study populations at Wintergreen every winter for 4 years. These two photo caches alone constitute well over 50 GB of wildlife photos from the past 8 years. Not one photo contained any animal that may be considered a cougar. In fact, Bill McShea, the professor overseeing the eMammal project, stated that at more than 2,200 locations not one camera captured an image of a mountain lion.
This eMammal project also illuminated human failings. The eMammal project was not created just to find wildlife but also to study how good “citizen scientists” are at identifying what they are seeing in still digital form. My natural conclusion before starting the project was identification was the easy part. I was proven wrong. On average, the project achieved an 82% accuracy at identifying photos of animals in a still digital photograph (Wintergreen “guinea pigs” scored closer to 75%). That means given all the time in the world and all the identification resources available, we were wrong on our identification 18% of the time. Photos can be tricky to analyze and thus come under scrutiny. If our identification of still imagery is hard to trust, that begs the question how trustworthy is a sighting we saw for less than 5 seconds?
The second data set I possess that leads to being skeptical of sightings by golfers on the Devils Knob golf course or by drivers cruising down Wintergreen Drive is my years supervising hunting on our open space at Wintergreen. Hunting as a management tool provides data such as what is harvested and what is seen in our backcountry. Not one survey in the past decade came back with a recorded puma sighting. If hunters sitting silently in scent proof clothing with scopes and binoculars have never seen a cougar moving through 4000 acres of open space, it seems unlikely to me that a mountain lion is hanging out on a crowded golf course. The other key is the use of hunting dogs by bear hunters. When chased by dogs in legal hunts in western states, cougars usually climb trees making easy targets by cameras, which everyone carries these days in the shape of phones. Not one hunter has reported or photographed a treed mountain lion at Wintergreen or in the entire state. It is conceivable that hunters sitting quietly would miss the stealthy cougar, but it seems much less likely the keen noses of a pack of hound dogs would miss the scent of this apex predator.
My last resource that leads me to doubt the presence of cougars is myself. Having spent 15 years covering hundreds of miles per year of Blue Ridge forest, I have had zero sightings, come across zero questionable carcasses, seen zero tracks, and found zero scat that might be attributed to an eastern cougar roaming the woods at Wintergreen. When I am not present in the woods, I make sure to have trail cameras distributed over the landscape to ensure I see what is moving through our forest. I currently have four cameras in obscure locations hoping to get the shot of whatever may come past.
Now to the scientific reasoning of a possible mountain lion encounter. Cougars have a giant home range of up to 370 square miles. They have also been known to make staggering treks. A cougar was killed by a car in Connecticut in 2011. The genetic study of the animal led scientists to believe it came from South Dakota which meant it travelled 1500 miles. That is amazing and opens the door to Virginia being the home for juvenile males pushed out of other males’ range. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency confirmed reports in 2015 of sightings in western Tennessee. It is believed that one of the confirmed photos was of a female mountain lion. That is the key to having a population – the presence of mates. A breeding population moves very slowly due to the natural hindrance of having cubs. The young cougars stay with mom for 1-2 years and slows down all migration to the east. Mountain lions are definitely coming to Virginia. It is the timeline that is in dispute.
I am skeptical of each sighting of mountain lion when no physical evidence is present. When identifying animals, you must first rule out the common before considering the rare. There will be a day when the rare appears, but until evidence clearly points to the apex predator of North America at our doorsteps, I will declare Wintergreen a mountain lion free zone.
Hi Josh,
I understand your doubt but my story may help you to understand cougars better. My wife and I owned a cottage near Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in NW Michigan in the 90’s. One evening in the summer of 1998 about sunset we were driving through the park on M22 to meet friends for dinner. As we rounded a curve a cougar galloped across the road about 50′ in front of us. We were shocked because, according to our DNR, cougars had been extinct in Michigan since 1908. Nobody believed us, of course, but over the next 5 years sightings became so common that the National Park Service put up signs on the trails at Sleeping Bear warning people about cougars. Our DNR didn’t acknowledge cougars until 2008 when trail cam pictures started to document them.
Flash forward to 2014 after we bought a retirement home near Saugatuck in SW Michigan. There was a 1,000 acre state park a few miles from town where we would walk our dogs nearly every day while on vacation there. One morning, I found tracks of a cougar that appeared to be following a lone deer down to the Lake Michigan shore. I told the gate ranger about it but he said “we don’t have any cats in the park”. A few days later he stopped me as I was entering the park and said his partner pulled a partly eaten deer out of the lakeshore the morning I claimed to have seen the tracks. About two weeks later I caught a glimpse of the cougar as it slinked behind a fallen tree away from me about 25 yards from the trail. I didn’t see further signs of him (I assumed he was a male who had worked his way down south – this park is about 2 1/2 hours north of Chicago whereas Sleeping Bear is more like a 5 hour drive from Chicago) but I kept my eyes open for tracks.
In 2018 I found tracks along the lakeshore. On the way back to the parking lot, I heard a faint rustle in the brush, a big thump and another faint rustle. I didn’t think it was a deer because you can hear them tromp through the woods for 50-100 yards after scaring them up. So, I started into the woods towards the sound to see if I could scare up whatever it was but didn’t get 10′ when my dogs put on the brakes and started looking off to their left. I assumed it was the cougar and that we were being circled so I backed out of the woods and reported to the gate rangers that it looked like the male “was back”. One took the trouble to check out the lakeshore tracks and told me a couple of days later that it wasn’t a male but a female with one or more kittens. While we tried to put up his game camera along the trail where I had heard the sounds, he was ordered by the regional supervisor not to. So, I bought my own camera and took it out to the park. As I was approaching the spot where I had heard the sounds, the female blasted out of a thicket about 20′ in front of me at an angle of about 90 degrees. I figured she was leading me away from her kit and that I had discovered one of her den sites. I came back the next day but approached the den site from the beginning of the ravine it was in making enough noise to alert the momma that I was coming her way. I got to one thicket I couldn’t see into and started to circle it when a plane came overhead making a growling sound (there’s an airport about 7 miles from the park). So, I stopped and waited until plane was out of earshot and took 1 or 2 more steps when I heard a light growl coming out of the thicket about 10′ away. It was a warning from the momma that I was too close and I made my exit from the area.
I had a total of 7 interactions with her over the next few weeks but never did get a good enough picture of her. I continued to track her in the park until August, 2019 when I found her tracks along with the tracks of her 2nd kit leaving the park northbound with the tracks of a new male not more than an hour behind her (his tracks were considerably bigger than the previous male and I assumed the female was leaving to prevent her kit from being killed. I never saw her tracks again).
Long story short, during the entire 4.5 year period this all took place, I only saw a glimpse of the male and one glimpse of the female plus one other sighting in the open when I caught her sunbathing on a dune about 150 yards behind the beach (I was stunned and didn’t get my Iphone out of my pocket until after she disappeared into the foliage at the top of the dune – I did capture her 2nd kit in a pic who was about 10′ behind her but at 130 yards it looked a lot like a fox – my later measurements against the silhouette of a fox showed it was 2″ higher at the shoulder plus the wrong color for red foxes but that didn’t convince anyone). Bottom line, even though I knew where her den site was and knew where she left and reentered the park on her nightly hunts, she still managed to avoid a decent shot. All during that time, only two hikers reported seeing a cougar and only one of the rangers spotted her (he was the one who reported to me that she was out by the dunes so we confirmed each other’s story – however, the DNR still wouldn’t publicly admit there were ANY cougars in SW Michigan much less a breeding female).
So here’s my advice: Next time you get a fairly reliable report, check that trail out and place several game cameras up where the sighting was reported and leave them there – near water if possible. Your scent will be recognizable for at least a day or two so stay away from the cameras for a while. The only time you are likely to see a cougar is at dawn or dusk and then it’s still unlikely – of the 30,000 or so hikers who came down the trails during the time I was using them, only 2 reported seeing a cougar and none reported tracks as they probably didn’t know what they looked like nor were they looking for them. Be looking for tracks in locations where they can be made and after rain or snow but before the people get on the trails. Also, check claw marks on trees – they’ll usually be 3-5″ wide and 2-3′ long and about 2-4 feet off the ground. If you see any confirmed signs, report them to the VA DNR and put up trail signs that say “You may be entering cougar country. If you see one, do not run. If approached, throw sticks or stones. If attacked, fight back”.
Lastly, I’ll be moving from Michigan to the Shenandoah Valley next week. If you would like to hear the full story, feel free to give me a call at 571 225-1229 (if I don’t answer, leave a message as I usually block callers that don’t leave messages). I’ve looked over the reports of a few VA sightings and I’m pretty convinced there are some number of cougars in VA. I plan of putting my new found knowledge of their habits to use when I move. I do not expect any help from the VA DNR as, just like MI, their budget is built from hunting and fishing licenses, a revenue sources that’s stagnant if not declining. It’s also pretty doubtful, for a number of reasons, that the VA legislature would be willing to put up the money required to protect a complex endangered species, especially a predator the size of a mountain lion.
Sincerely,
Jack Hartman