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The Strafford & Area Lions conducted its Food From The Heart food drive February 11th through the 18th, collecting 981.6 pounds of food and receiving monetary donations of $1,262 which were used to purchase food and other items to be donated to the Sharon, Vershire and Thetford food shelves. Blodgett and I were returning from a day spent looking forand finding timber rattlesnakes, a species that is endangered in Vermont. Those who believe the growth and expansion of mountain lion populations to be a good thing routinely make the old, you face a greater danger of being struck by lighting or drowned in the bathtub argument and it is no doubt accurate. Periods of snow. In March of 1965, the Colorado legislature repealed the old mountain lion bounty of $50, which was first enacted in 1924. Videos - Industry Stories; Find Candidates; And there have been fatal attacks. . How big was the animal? And, then, some species didnt need any help from humans but managed to extend their range into now-recovered and suitable habitats. Feb 28, 2023 4:00 am By Robert Spencer 1 Comment. It can run 50 miles an hour and clear a twelve-foot fence. The second occasion was on the way to work when I saw the cougar/catamount crossing Route 44. It continues in Connecticut, where that South Dakota cat was killed in 2011, and in Massachusetts, despite two credible reports in the past quarter century (in one case, DNA-confirmed scat; in the other, verified tracks). As cleared lands became reforested, many species that had been squeezed into small regions where there was still habitat,or hunted to near extinction, could be replanted in their former range. All of which is to say that if Alexander Crowell wasnt afraid on that long-ago Thanksgiving Day, he probably should have been. I was agnostic, I suppose, on these stories which the state wildlife biologists inevitably found impossible to substantiate and, often, easy to disprove. Wildlife management programs succeeded in reintroducing species to areas where they had not been seen for years. Responding to complaints about a predator eating a local farmers sheep, Crowell and a small group of fellow hunters had tracked the big cat through the snow. I did call in a report to CT DEP and they basically dismissed my narrative questioning whether I made a mistake confusing the animal I saw with a bobcat or fisher cat. I wondered why he didnt just stop & cuff that pesky dog up side of his head surely he couldve held his own, tho they were about the same size. By now, I knew the answer to that one. The catamount is a creature of stealth and concealment; it stalks its prey, which on the EasternSeaboard would likely be deer, moose, porcupines, beavers, and domestic livestock. Email: info@grnvt.com. If these animals are not in the habitat, what we see is an overabundance of herbivores., The ecologist John Laundre, who has spent 35 years studying cougars, concurs. By the late 20th century, the range of the catamount was confined to several western states and a small remnant population along the Gulf Coast that was eventually squeezed down into the Everglades/Big Cypress area of Florida and reduced to a couple of dozen animals of poor genetic quality due to inbreeding. A wildlife camera snapped the image in late 2019 and the refuge shared it on Facebook this month, challenging followers to find the hidden mountain lion. Bearded, bowler hat, expression impenetrable behind facial hair and the stoicism of an earlier era. Defenders of Wildlife developed funding to support wolf predation on cattle which I believe worked. Were arrogant if we think were the only species that makes decisions based on fear, he told me when I called him at his home in Oregon. Ottmann and I walked farther. (The cat I saw when I was a young boy was on the Gulf Coast.). We need [an apex] predator back on the land, Sue Morse told me. That was plain, right away. It has nothing to do with trophy hunting, public safety, etc. When we reached tower, a ranger arrived in a pickup. I came across a dead adult deer carcass high up in an oak tree. These settlers established measures for predator control by any means possible. It was his great coolness and daring (either that, or fear) that enabled Crowell to shoot the animal at a distance of one rod only (roughly 16 feet), first hitting it in the leg with his shotgun, then dispatching it with a bullet to the head from a borrowed rifle. In Vermont, in the late 19th century, this meant, especially, sheep. You wouldnt shake hands with a man like that, she said, and though she was smiling I could tell she was serious. Then, a mountain lion was run over by an SUV on the outskirts of New Haven, Connecticut. Out & About | Best New England Holiday Events for 2019. My husband and where riding our Motorcycle down Rte 110 near Milan NH It is hard for me to believe that the big cats havent found plenty of space to roam without regular detection. You need breeding pairs and theyd probably settle down long before they got here.. He and his clients were 100% sure of what they saw, and its very difficult to imagine any other animal being mistaken for a cougar in this case. Its range was once similarly vast; from the high north regions of the Yukon to the Straits of Magellan. Coyotes, for instance, found their way into Vermont with no help. The animal was shot in the town of Barnard on Thanksgiving Day 1881 by a man named Alexander Crowell. Most of those sightings were misidentifications, Doug Blodgett says. The tail, I said. The Christian school also dropped out of the state . This, said Vermont Fish and Wildlife fur-bearer project leader Chris Bernier, is why he takes reports of mountain lion sightings seriously. Vermont offers plenty of habitat in which mountain lions could thrive. So, traffic had been slowed from both ends for a good 3-5 minutes. I thought about why this might be and the best I could come up with for an answer is that we feel a kind of nostalgia for the wild. I had a pair of good binoculars in my coat pocket. Honestly, leaving this out of your article would seem to perpetuate the notion that there is a conspiracy to keep us all in ignorance. Body coloration can range from tan to gray and cubs are usually covered with blackish brown spots. On the other side, there are those (as represented here by Bill Betty and Bo Ottmann, along with a number of others I spoke with) who say the overwhelming quantity of anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. I just heard from a fellow college student of a siting in Greenfield last fall and two in Colrain this spring. This much was certain: it was a wild mountain lion and it was in an area where one had not been seen for more than 100 years. In 2011, the U.S. But there was certainty, or near-certainty, on the part of the witnesses who, it seemed, would swear to having seen a catamount. Clearly, Puma concolor once inhabited the forests of the Northeast, although its difficult to say in what numbers. That it had, somehow, made a return and established residence. Regarding a breeding population that is the unknown. This Everglades panther population has recently recovered after wildlife biologists brought in some animals from Texas to breed with the last few native cats and this story is typical of the conservation ethic that has taken hold in the United States. It was a bright sunny summer day. There was the vaguest of trails, crisscrossed by deadfalls and a sharp-thorned bush that soon drew blood from Ottmanns right hand. Ive heard some biologists say it is not a distinct subspecies. And consider, for a moment, the concern and outright fear an official acknowledgment of such a carnivorous and predatory creature might evoke. I met with Morse at her home in Jericho. But it was also a male. In the second camp, there are those issuing the denials, pointing to the lack of photographic evidence, or the absence of tracks, or the simple truth that many people dont seem to know the difference between a cougar and a bobcat and a lynx and even, in some cases, a golden retriever. People in Colorado communities might need to warn their children and to look over their own shoulders when they were out jogging, but not here. on route to stone tower on Quabbin Hill. Tom Stearns, a Vermont Game Warden says they get reports all the time. Forty years of reporting on New Hampshire cougar sightings has convinced Harrigan that the state is home to at least a handful of breeding animals. Theres probably 100 in Connecticut, Ottmann interrupted, rolling a cigarette as he spoke. There was never, of course, a photograph. Within six weeks, he continued, I was getting off the plane in Jackson Hole for a national mountain lion conference. Id been excited to read the news that wildlife officials would be releasing wolves in Yellowstone and thrilled, a few years later, when I heard, from a campsite on Slough Creek, the music of their howling. Large swaths of Vermont and nearby states along the Appalachian spine have gone from cleared land back to the kind of second-growth forest that is excellent habitat for deer and, thus, their predators, the most efficiently lethal of which is the mountain lion. Not a bobcat or a coyote or a fisher or anything else that might be mistaken for a mountain lion. near Greenfield with an experienced guide that hed worked with several times. Several years ago, I saw what was definitely a cougar walking along a street. I go out into the woods on the opening day of deer season every year and a lot of other Vermonters are out there with me. A 2,000 Mile Journey But it seems virtually inevitable that a time is coming when that thing you see on the trail up ahead of you might be something to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Much as I liked Ottmann and Betty, and much as I found some of their evidence compelling, I was struggling to reconcile their more provocative claims with the restraint expressed by the many other experts Id spoken with. These were old growth woods and the canopy had kept the ground cover down, so I could see three or four hundred yards ahead of me but not clearly, because of the gloom. 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