Mountain lion is said to prowl village street

Big cat sighting reported to police, but chief says evidence is lacking

By Brian Nearing

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

ADVANCE FOR SUNDAY, AUG. 9--FILE--A cougar strolls along a log in a protected cougar area of Northwest Trek, a wildlife park near Eatonville, Wash., in this 1998 photo. Once hunted nearly to extinction, cougars are on the rebound from the Pacific to theRockies in an ecological success story that's causing both celebration and nervous glances over the shoulder. Worries are growing that cougars are getting too comfortable around the booming human population that shares their habitat. (AP Photo/NorthwestTrek, Dick Milligan)

Social media sites lit up Wednesday after a small police department in Washington County posted an unconfirmed report that residents had spotted a mountain lion on a village street and in a nearby cemetery.

Cambridge-Greenwich Police Chief George Bell said he had no evidence to back up two alleged Monday sightings on North Union Street. The village of about 1,800 residents is near the Vermont border, about 30 miles northeast of Albany.

But that did not stop people from commenting on the police department's Facebook page that gave notice of the sightings, with some saying that they had seen mountain lions before, while others dismissed such accounts as mistakes. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has long maintained that there are no breeding populations of the big cats in the state, but that isolated cases of released pets or young male cats passing through areas in search of mates and territory are possible.
"I wanted to err on the side of caution," Bell said. "It is unlikely, but a possibility. What if someone is walking around and comes across it?" He also said he did not want to encourage residents to take up arms in a search-and-destroy effort against wildlife.

Bell said his office had received sighting reports last year in that same area of the village that led to suspicious tracks. Upon examination by DEC, they turned out to be from a bobcat, a native cat that is much smaller than a mountain lion. And so far in that part of northern Washington County, which contains many farms with cattle and other livestock, there have been no reports of animals being devoured by mysterious large predators, Bell said.

Mountain lion sightings are not uncommon, but DEC will only investigate reports where physical evidence such as tracks, scat or hair exist, or when a captive animal has been reported to have escaped, according to the DEC website.

Most cases involve misidentification, according to DEC, with cougars "commonly mistaken for wild bobcats, fishers and coyotes, as well as domestic house cats and dogs."

"There is no evidence of a breeding population of mountain lions in the state," said DEC spokeswoman Wendy Rosenbach, citing absence of cats being run over by cars, lack of scat, fur or farm animal predation. "But if people see something, can get some pictures, they can give us a call."
Public speculation over cougars is so prevalent that DEC also has had to officially deny rumors that the agency has deliberately released the big cats to control the whitetail deer population.

Official policy aside, there were more than 40 posts to the Cambridge-Greenwich Police Facebook page debating whether the cats are really in residence, with people claiming sightings in Bennington, Shushan and Spiegletown. Others mocked the idea as akin to a "redneck" fantasy or seeing a Bigfoot.

In late 2010, a 140-pound wild mountain lion passed through Lake George, coming within a 10-minute car drive of the Village Hall. State officials recorded cat tracks in the snow that were the size of saucers but did not inform local officials the predatory cat was on the prowl.

Federal wildlife officials later used DNA to trace the young male's origin to South Dakota, and said its 1,800-mile cross-country trip went through Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan on the way through the Capital Region and beyond.

The following June, the animal was hit by a car and killed crossing a highway in Connecticut. DEC officials acknowledged it was the same animal.

Mountain lion attacks on humans are rare. There have been about 100 recorded attacks in the U.S. and Canada during the last century: about a tenth of those were fatal, according to the Arizona Fish and Game Department.

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