Officially, the eastern cougar has not prowled the great piney woods of New York state's Adirondacks for more than 100 years. Though still listed as a federally endangered species, it is, in the minds of state environmental officials, a phantom -- extinct, kaput.
Trouble is, people keep seeing them. And one man, Peter V. O'Shea Jr., a former New York City police sergeant turned self-taught naturalist, is on a campaign to make their presence known. He himself has never seen a cougar, also called a puma, mountain lion, panther or painter. But he has talked to scores of people who say they have, and he says he has seen cougar tracks four times in the past 20 years.
"My feeling is that in the Adirondacks, they were never quite extirpated," O'Shea said over lunch at the Lumberjack Inn here, as snow swirled outside. "Of any place they could have survived, it's here."
At 6 million acres, the Adirondack Park is larger than the five largest national parks put together, and though it includes towns and villages tucked among its vast wilderness, in many places one can walk for miles in any direction without hitting a private dirt road.
What O'Shea finds compelling is the credible nature of many of the cougar sightings, including several by staff members of the state's Department of Environmental Conservation.
"Hate to admit it," reads one such report made to the agency in 1997 by Kenneth Kogut, its own wildlife manager for the region that covers most of the Adirondacks. "Landed in road in front of me, looked at me and in three bounds was off into shrubs on south side of road."
O'Shea believes the reason the agency does not want to admit that cougars are living in the Adirondacks has to do with time and money. Because of the cat's endangered status, official acknowledgement would likely trigger a management plan. It could also pit environmentalists against land owners already chafing under government regulation.
But state officials maintain that there is simply no sustainable, or breeding, cougar population. Yes, there are sightings, though the overwhelming majority, they say, are misidentifications. People who glimpse the real thing -- a large tawny cat weighing from 30kg to 55kg, with a black-tipped tail -- are seeing pets that either escaped or were released, officials say.
It is illegal for private citizens to keep cougars as pets in New York, but a senior wildlife biologist with the agency, Al Hicks, says people do anyway. "I'm sure a good many, after buying a cute little cougar kitten and watching it get up to 30kg, say, `Wow, I can't handle this,'" Hicks said.
In a point-counterpoint essay published in 2000 in the periodical Adirondack Explorer, Hicks and O'Shea dueled over the cougar question.
Hicks noted that only two cougars had been shot in the previous 30 years. One had clearly been a captive animal, and the other appeared to have been one as well. Furthermore, Hicks argued, there is no record of cougars taken by sportsmen before the 1970s, when it was legal to hunt them. "It would take many, many animals surviving over decades to have a population, and it's just not there," he said.
The agency receives a dozen or so reports of cougar sightings each year from across the state. But O'Shea said he knew of more than 40 sightings in just the past year in the Adirondacks and surrounding area. He does not try to argue that there is a sizable population of cougars in the park, maybe two dozen at most. And he does agree that a good number are escapes or releases.
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