Mountain lions are well established in most states west of the Mississippi River, and they have recently entered Iowa, Arkansas and Missouri, according to Roland Kays, the mammal curator at the New York State Museum and the co-author of, Mammals of North America (Princeton University Press, 2002).
In Kays' view, the sporadic Northeast sightings do not add up to a wild cougar presence. Kretser tends to agree. "There hasn't been a carcass or good tracks," she said. "No one has found a den per se. In places where there are cougars, these things happen."
Still, Kretser finds the continuous sightings intriguing. "There is something out there," she said. "People are definitely seeing something."
O'Shea presses on. He would like the state to acknowledge what he regards as the probability that wild cougars are here, and the possibility that they never left. "I can't prove there's a self-sustaining population," he said. "But it's beyond sense that people would be letting pets go for 50 years, and what's more that they would be surviving."
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