Have You Seen Me? If You Have, Uncle Sam Wants to Know

By Diane Tennant, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.

Mar. 2–Seen a mountain lion?

If you have, Uncle Sam wants to know.

Twenty years behind schedule, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is collecting evidence to help it decide whether eastern cougars are really extinct or whether they ever existed at all.

The decision could result in the big cats’ removal from the endangered species list.

It all comes down, in part, to what you call it.

Mountain lions are also called cougars, pumas, stone cats, panthers, ghost cats, catamounts and painters, but that’s not the problem. The difficulty is that mountain lions were divided in the 1800s into 15 subspecies. Only two of those subspecies are protected by the Endangered Species Act — the Florida panther and the eastern cougar.

In the West, where mountain lion is the preferred name, the cats are plentiful enough that hunting is allowed by some states. But genetic research at the University of Maryland has determined that all North American lions are the same and should be considered one species.

“That is one of the questions: Is there a difference between the eastern and the western, and we’re looking at that,” said Diana Weaver, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

If there’s no such thing as an eastern cougar, are there still cougars living in the East? If they are, would they be protected if the same species is plentiful in the West? Too early to speculate, Weaver said. A species declared extinct would definitely lose protection.

Cougars have been reported in Virginia 121 times since 1970, according to the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

None of the sightings has been proven. The last bona fide, guaranteed, without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt cougar found in the commonwealth was killed near Abingdon in 1882.

Because of a lack of evidence either way, the Fish and Wildlife Service has presumed the eastern cougar to be extinct. Still, it was added to the federal endangered species list in 1973. Although the Endangered Species Act calls for a review of each listed species every five years — Are there more of them? Fewer? Should they still be on the list? — the cougar’s status has not been reviewed since 1982.

That is the year that a recovery plan for the eastern cougar was published by the federal agency. The service says the 20-year delay was caused by limited resources and higher priorities.

Donald Linzey, a biology professor at Wytheville Community College and a founder of the Eastern Cougar Foundation, has 204 reported sightings that he deems credible. But analyses of hair and droppings have not turned up proof of cougars yet.

He does have photographs that he says were taken in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, but photos are not proof enough because they can be faked.

A photo of a cougar is posted on the Web site of Cougar Quest, a Virginia-based group trying to prove the existence of the eastern cougar. The caption claims the photo was taken in Pennsylvania in March 2005.

But the same photo was published with a magazine article by a biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, who said it was shot in Wyoming.

“There’s no evidence of any cougar populations east of the Mississippi River outside of Florida,” said Mark Dowling, a director of the Cougar Network, a nonprofit, non-advocacy research organization in the Midwest. “A population is where you have females, males, kittens. There have been occasional individual animals east of the Mississippi River confirmed.”

One of those was a kitten killed on a Kentucky highway in 1997. But lab tests showed it to have South American DNA, Dowling said, which means it was of captive origin.

Some cougar advocates favor protection for escaped captives whether their DNA is North or South American.

The Fish and Wildlife Service says there are thousands of captive cougars in the United States, not all held legally. Escapees could account for some of the sightings in the East, the agency says.

Reports have come from Suffolk, from Interstate 85 near the Nottoway River, from Charlottesville and points west. None has been proven.

Even if individual animals are there, no proof exists of a breeding population, Dowling said.

South Dakota does have cougars, perhaps 200, Dowling said. Even though it has fewer miles of highway than Virginia, 27 cougars have been killed by vehicles in three years.

“Wherever you have cougar populations, their bodies turn up on a regular basis,” Dowling said. “It’s inevitable and unavoidable.”

No road-killed cougars have been reported in Virginia.

— Reach Diane Tennant at (757) 446-2478 or diane.tennant@pilotonline.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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