Seeing a mountain lion is like peering into the past, an untamed and untrammeled world, a world in perfect balance.
I have never seen a mountain lion—not in the wild, at least. This should not be surprising, even if I do live in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, as in 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the mountain lion extinct in the Northeast and formally removed it from the endangered species list (as “extirpated,” meaning locally extinct) in 2018.
Indeed, by the late 1800s, the mountain lion had largely disappeared from New York State due to hunting and trapping—and a bounty had even been placed on the big cat’s head as a dangerous predator and threat to livestock.
Yet, soon after I moved here, nearly twenty years ago, I started hearing about mountain lions. They were, it seemed, everywhere—predictably in the rugged “High Peaks” Eastern Catskills and still-wild Catskill foothills to the west, but even on the edges of rural villages and towns, glimpsed in backyards and casually crossing country roads.
Indeed, whenever I lecture, as a naturalist, inviting people to share their own wildlife tales, I am overwhelmed by reports of mountain lion sightings.
According to the so-called “experts,” notably, the wildlife biologists of the NY DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation), there are no demonstrable signs of a breeding population of mountain lions here—by “demonstrable signs,” I mean verifiable tracks, scat, hair, even the carcasses of deer (or sheep or cattle) which would reveal the big cat’s characteristic bite marks caused by its sharp, saber-like teeth.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/one-planet/201909/wildness