Late-Night Lions & the Slippery Truth

I looked both ways across the highway interchange and darted across the pavement with a flashlight in my hand. Stopping on the grass only a few feet from the road I pointed the light down at the strange carcass below me. A long, tawny-colored corpse with a half-skeletonized face. The blunt, heavy jaw with long, heavy canine teeth.

Reporter Ted Strong of the Daily Progress and I had driven hours on short notice in the dark to look for what we were told was a road-killed mountain lion in a state that officially has no mountain lions. In the first few seconds of staring at the battered body I thought that perhaps I'd finally found what I'd spent years looking for.

A few years ago I accidentally became the point man for sightings of wild cougars in Virginia. I became interested in the topic of sightings of mountain lions in Virginia and in the Southeast generally. So I spent a few weeks doing research and then I wrote up a blog entry summarizing my own thoughts and theories on the subject.

Then a funny thing happened. People really cared. Years later I still get comments on that blog entry. I get thousands of hits every week on that piece. Rarely does a week go by when I do not get an email from someone describing a cougar sighting. It seems that if you search the internet for information about mountain lions in Virginia, my blog entry usually comes up first. All of these people who have just seen something in the wild that they can't explain have been coming here first.

Gradually I began to feel a sense of responsibility. All of these people were looking to me as not only a source of information but as someone to talk to about a strange thing that nobody else will believe. Moreover, they wanted me to do something about it!

I considered every email and photo sent to me with care, concern and an increasingly logical approach. At first the photos seemed particularly important. Photographs really seem like they should be proof of the thing that they show. Only the more I looked and the more that I thought the more I realized that photographs usually tell us more about ourselves and what we want to see than about what is really there.

Someone sends me a picture of what is very clearly a cougar. I can see the long, sinuous body in graceful predatory action. Perhaps it is even dragging a deer carcass. Every detail of the face is obvious. The email says, 'this was taken by a trail camera near the George Washington National Forest in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.'

Hot damn! Photographic evidence! Well, not so fast. How do we know where the picture was really taken? I can see some trees, some indistinct plants. Dirt. A rock. This could have been anywhere. Maybe somewhere in Montana or California where mountain lions are often seen and expected.

That is what I have concluded when sent a photo that clearly shows an unambiguous mountain lion. Every. Single. Time. The location and date claimed for the picture was fraudulent. Usually the person who sent it to me had the best of intentions. His friend, neighbor or cousin sent him the photo with a misleading caption. When in doubt I start tracking it down and ask the person who supposedly took the photo to show me the spot where it was taken so I can see those same trees and rock and dirt. This never ends well.

The ambiguous photos always depict either a domestic cat or a bobcat. There are little cues to look for.

My most challenging source of red herrings is credible witnesses. Time after time I hear accounts of sightings from people who know what they are talking about. Park rangers, former game wardens, experienced hunters, western ranch-owners, etc. People who know what a wild cougar looks like. I don't think that any of those people who have contacted me were deliberately lying. They all really believed in what they felt they had seen. Yet someone who has seen a lot of cougars is, if anything, probably more likely to fit what they have seen into that familiar 'cougar' category than someone who knows very little about them. Just a few days ago I mistook a distant image of a sambar doe for a whitetail. I, who have butchered countless deer and who has written a book on whitetails, made this error. I made it because my whitetail-wired brain wants to turn everything into a whitetail.

The only evidence that might really mean something would be physical evidence. Not a photo or a story but an honest-to-goodness dead cougar on the ground that can be examined and used for DNA analysis. I stopped caring about photos very much and started paying more attention to anything involving dead cats. People would email me sometimes about a cougar that had been hit by a car but in every case it was so long after the fact and so far away that there wouldn't be any point to my trying to go out and collect the evidence.

Finally I got an email this morning from a very intelligent woman informing me that there was a dead lion sitting by the side of the road in Culpeper Virginia and would someone please come and do something about it already.

The premise isn't so ridiculous. Yes, the eastern cougar subspecies is now officially extinct and there hasn't been a 'confirmed' sighting of a cougar in Virginia since the early twentieth century (by the way, there is really no such thing as a 'confirmed sighting' of any species in my opinion. There are only eyewitness reports that you personally choose to agree with or not. No person in a position of authority is much better equipped to discern between the quality of various eyewitness reports than you or I. Sightings alone are almost never hard evidence). But cougars are a species native to Virginia and we know for a fact that they can survive here. They disappeared arguably because of over-hunting due to the bounties put on their heads rather than because of any inherent inability to survive here.

While working on 'Eating Aliens' I went to a lot of different places and saw some pretty strange species thriving in North America that weren't supposed to exist here at all in the wild. African gazelles in Texas; Asian aquatic snails in Virginia; Mexican lizards in Florida. Right now there are central American armadillos breeding in Nebraska. An Asian prawn the size of my forearm just started breeding off the coast of Louisiana and nobody has the slightest idea as to how it really got there.

Nearly any species can suddenly appear nearly anywhere in the world at this point. International trade and the desires for exotic pets and plants have transported absurd things into novel places where they have thrived. The idea that cougars from North America are thriving again in an area where they only disappeared in the last century is less absurd than any of the situations that resulted in chapters of 'Eating Aliens.'

How could cougars get here? There are three explanations that seem likely to me.

First, we could have western cougars colonizing the area. Young cougars can disperse a very long way when they go out on their own to find their own territory. A few years ago one was killed in Connecticut which had traveled all the way there from the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Second, escaped exotic pets could provide a small but genetically diverse basis for a wild population. Many thousands of people have pet cougars and sometimes they escape. Sometimes they escape and other times the door just sort of gets left open when the pet becomes inconvenient for some reason.

Third, it is possible (though unlikely) that there has been a remnant population of the eastern cougar subspecies here in Virginia all along.

Or I suppose it is possible that sightings have resulted from some combination of all three vectors.

What I had hoped that I would find tonight was a dead cougar that could be the start of an examination of physical evidence. That we could sent DNA samples off for analysis to start answering some of these questions.

I crouched on the damp ground beside the body along the highway interchange and looked closely. One of the women who had contacted me about the carcass, Donna, stood nearby.

Donna was as ideal a witness as I could ever ask for. She even knew her big cats. As a former volunteer at an exotic cat rescue facility she had seen cougars up close and personal. If Donna thought that she was looking at a dead cougar then she probably knew what she was talking about more so than 99% of the people who could possibly ever contact me.

The basic shape of the head was right. The size of the animal was about like a young cougar. This fit with the idea of young cougars tending to go a long way during dispersal and getting hit by cars. The partially skeletonized tail was almost the right length. Perhaps post-mortem shrinkage could account for it being a bit short. It was certainly much too long for a bobcat.

Enough hide remained on the body that I could see it was the correct tawny color expected of a cougar.

Man, did this thing ever look like a dead cougar. I started thinking about where we could get a bigger cooler this late at night to haul the entire body away in.

But I saw what I wanted to see. I tried to think more rigorously. The simplest way to narrow things down should be through the teeth, which were intact.

I was struck by the uniformity of the size of the front teeth. They reminded me of my dog's front teeth. Behind each canine was a row of molars that seemed too numerous. I have had the lower mandible of a domestic cat sitting on my desk in front of my computer monitor at home for the last few months since plucking it out of some bobcat scat to identify (I realize how ridiculous I am for even being able to write those words). Often I have noted how very few teeth are behind the canines; it stood to reason that other felids should have the same basic layout of teeth.

The remains of the paws firmed up my opinion. Too narrow. This wasn't a cougar. It was a pit bull.

Even when the animal is dead, right there, on the ground in front of us, most of us have no idea what we are really looking at. We see what we think that we see. And that is with what seems to be unassailable physical evidence. Photographs are worth even less. A glimpse of something strong, tan-colored, and long-tailed darting across the road is so unrevealing as to be meaningless.

I want there to be wild cougars in Virginia. I really do. And I still think that they are probably out there, though I accept the possibility that I am wrong. Meanwhile I'm still looking.


[Apologies for the grisly photograph, copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers. It seemed too relevant for me to fail to include it. This is a photo of the non-cougar that I traveled to Culpeper to see. Note the first pre-molar right below the canine tooth. That gives it all away]