New Mountain Lion Sighting

[creek wader]

Just got this in an email. . ... JEFFERSON CITY--Officials with the Missouri Department of Conservation have confirmed a sighting of a free-ranging mountain lion in the central Ozarks. They say they will continue to investigate in hopes of learning more about its habits and origins.

Jim Hurst of Success reported the sighting to Conservation Agent Jim Pokorny Jan. 10 after returning from an afternoon rabbit hunt. Hurst was hunting with his son Matt and a friend, Mike Turner, on private property when their two beagles stopped out of sight of the trio.

"They were baying like they had something treed," said Hurst, "so I sent Matt down the hill to see what they were up to. I thought maybe a rabbit had gone inside a hollow tree or something."

Hurst's 20-year-old son found the dogs beneath a large black oak tree. He heard something overhead and when he looked up he saw the mountain lion on a horizontal limb about 15 feet above him.

"The first thing he noticed was its tail," said the elder Hurst. "He said it kind of growled at the dogs. He hollered 'Dad, you won't believe what this is!'"

At the sound of the shout, the lion jumped to a higher limb, then jumped out of the tree and fled downhill with the beagles in hot pursuit, leaving the hunters stunned. Hurst said his son's close-range encounter with the cat "scared him to death."

"He didn't know what to think," said the elder Hurst. "I was about 30 yards away. I didn't see it, but I sure heard it. Limbs were popping and snapping when it came out of that tree and there was a loud thud when it hit the ground. It sounded like the top of the tree had fallen."

Looking around the area, the hunters found a deer that the mountain lion apparently had killed and dragged under a cedar tree. It was within sight of the tree where the cat was seen.

By then it was late afternoon. The men had been finishing their hunt when they encountered the mountain lion, so they went home and reported the incident. The next morning, Pokorny visited the area, accompanied by Conservation Agent Roy Hoggatt and Wildlife Damage Biologist Scott McWilliams.

McWilliams has followed up dozens of reports of mountain lion sightings, none of which panned out. But what he found that morning was unmistakeable.

"When we got up there, we met the guys who had seen it, and they had found another deer carcass," said McWilliams. "When I saw the deer kills, I knew we had the real thing."

One deer was a yearling doe. The other was an adult buck weighing about 140 pounds. Both carcasses bore typical signs of mountain lion kills-the abdomens had been opened and the paunches dragged out and away from the carcasses. The hearts, lungs and livers had been consumed, and the hide had been pulled away from the hindquarters to expose the meat.

McWilliams said the cat's tracks indicate it was a good-sized animal. "When I go on calls like this one, I take along a plaster cast of a paw print made by a 96-pound mountain lion. The tracks from this cat were bigger than the cast." Adult mountain lions weigh 80 to 160 pounds.

Dave Hamilton, Conservation Department furbearer biologist and a member of the agency's Mountain Lion Response Team, was excited about the find. "We've been looking for this for 15 years," he said. "For a couple of years we have had evidence that there were mountain lions out there, but we have always had questions about whether they were tame animals. This one is clearly capable of taking game and living wild."

Conservation Department workers will visit the area periodically over the next few weeks in hopes of learning more about the mountain lion or lions that are living in the area. The trick is to do so without disrupting its behavior.

Asked if the Conservation Department is considering trapping the mountain lion to run tests on it or fit it with a radio collar, Hamilton said, "We discussed that, but there doesn't seem to be a good enough reason to do it. This animal is doing what mountain lions are supposed to-preying on deer. It's not bothering people or livestock, so there doesn't seem to be a reason for disturbing it, other than satisfying our desire for information."

Hamilton said the Conservation Department may get information about the mountain lion's origin from the carcasses of the deer it killed. Swabs of bite wounds could yield DNA samples from the cat's saliva, making it possible to determine if it is genetically similar to mountain lions from other states.

"This is the very reason we put the Mountain Lion Response Team together," said Hamilton. "We need to be able to respond quickly when we get reports of sightings so we can get there before the evidence disappears. We were able to do that in this case and document this lion's existence. Hopefully it is just the first of many cases that will help us determine how many mountain lions are in Missouri, where they come from and how to approach their management."

Conservation officials did not disclose the location of the sighting due to concern for the animal's safety. They say the chance of encountering a mountain lion in Missouri is very small. Mountain lions are protected under The Wildlife Code of Missouri.

Hamilton said the Conservation Department appreciates the hunters' timely report of the mountain lion sighting and encourages others who see mountain lions to report the incidents.

[msubobcats]

That story is from 1999...

http://www.mdc.mo.gov/news/out/1999/012299.html

Somebody needs to find another one. With all the 'tree-cams' out there, somebody will get a pic someday.

Go Cats

[davekeim]

.............and Tigers and Bears, oh my!

Signed,

Cardiac

[zander]

In Shepherd of the Hills, he wrote in Ozark dialect at times, so people would call them catamounts and painters, but mountain lion or cougar or puma are not the traditional terms for them here. But they are one in the same.

[DD'sMC]

msubobcats~

Just so you know, my dad raises cattle over there by you. Last fall, right before hunting season, a couple of his cows turned up with large scratch and bite marks on their necks and hind quarters, and a calf came up missing. Also, my dad said that at that time the numerous deer and coyotes he had seen on his property earlier in the fall had just vanished. Within just a week or so of the attacks, he and his wife, both, at different times, saw the cat, but when they reported it to officials, they were told that " we don't have cougars here in Missouri, and that it was probably a pack of coyotes or wild dogs" that attacked the cows and got his calf. Maybe I'll suggest he gets a game cam set up this fall. Cougars sure can put the hurt on cattlemen and avid deer hunters. I hope that MDC are taking the reports and evidence more seriously these days.

[msubobcats]

msubobcats~

Just so you know, my dad raises cattle over there by you. Last fall, right before hunting season, a couple of his cows turned up with large scratch and bite marks on their necks and hind quarters, and a calf came up missing. Also, my dad said that at that time the numerous deer and coyotes he had seen on his property earlier in the fall had just vanished. Within just a week or so of the attacks, he and his wife, both, at different times, saw the cat, but when they reported it to officials, they were told that " we don't have cougars here in Missouri, and that it was probably a pack of coyotes or wild dogs" that attacked the cows and got his calf. Maybe I'll suggest he gets a game cam set up this fall. Cougars sure can put the hurt on cattlemen and avid deer hunters. I hope that MDC are taking the reports and evidence more seriously these days.

Oh, I don't doubt that at all. Both wildlife agencies in KS and MO are VERY resistant to any type of lion sighting. Why, I have no idea. That's why I did some digging on the article in this forum. It is out of the ordinary for wildlife officials to agree lions are here.

But I can tell you this, at risk of sounding like a kook. I too have seen a lion. It was in 1996, in rural Labette Co, Ks. I was driving around looking for dove fields and saw a large cat with a looooong tail about 25 yards into a disked milo field. I slowed the truck down and he/she walked back into the trees. I was 100 yards from the cat. I had seen several bobcats within the same 6 mile radius of the town of Montana, KS and had just returned home from living in the State of Montana for 8 years...this was NO BOBCAT.