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Lots of cougar reports, but no evidence

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HALIFAX — Every year, a couple dozen people call the provincial Department of Natural Resources reporting that they saw a cougar. And every year, the department looks, without success, for physical evidence that one of the big cats was in the area in question.

Many of those who contact the department are convinced they’ve seen one of the big cats, but with sometimes grainy photos, or none at all, staff need something physical to prove what was seen, like scat, hair, good footprints or clear photos with metadata to show where they were taken.

“For years, the department has been recording cougar reports, which goes back decades," said wildlife technician Butch Galvez. "There have been hundreds of reports, and no real hard evidence to go by.

“I’ve done investigations myself where the person was convinced 100 per cent that it was a cougar, and it turned out to be a house cat. I’ve had some that turned out to be raccoons or the neighbour’s dog. But then there are some that are very credible, but there’s no picture, no tracks, no evidence.”

Galvez said he gets several photos a year, including some in the past few weeks, and all turned out to be bobcats.

“Typically, we see an increase in cat sightings at this time of year, which probably is a function of, in the case of bobcats, more on the landscape," he said. "The kits are hunting, the prey abundance is changing, the leaves are coming off the trees so there’s more visibility.”

Bobcat and lynx are the only confirmed wild feline predators in the province.

“Our subspecies of bobcat is the largest in North America," Galvez said. “The male can go to 40 pounds, which is huge on a cat frame. It would be like seeing a golden retriever,

outline-wise.”

Her said the bobcat’s tails can be longer than 15 centimetres and held up and flicking in the air, “so it is visible from 20 or 30 yards, which is (the distance of) a lot of the reported (cougar) sightings.”

He said some of the photos that come in to the department are too blurry, and all the photos he’s looked at and biologists have reviewed over the years have turned out to be bobcats or other animals.

Galvez said there are thousands of trail cameras in the woods used by hunters and other people, but no one has sent in a picture that can be definitively identified as a cougar.

“Occasionally you’ll see someone post a picture on

Facebook and say, ‘Oh, this is Porters Lake in my backyard,’ or something like that, and it’s a picture of a cougar, but with followup we usually find it’s a picture from another part of North America.”

He said hunters’ trail cameras pick up bears, coyotes and other animals at bait piles during deer hunting season. With deer as a cougar’s primary food source, “you’d figure if a cougar was around, eventually one would show up on a trail cam,” he said.

Galvez said it’s a remote possibility that a single western cougar might have made its way into the province from Western Canada, but there is no sign of a population. The eastern cougar has been declared extinct in the

United States, with any occurrences there found to be western cougars or cougars that escaped or were released from captivity.

"Hinterland Who’s Who," now produced by the Canadian Wildlife Federation, says on its website that there is little physical evidence, such as road kills or scats, that cougars have been present in Eastern Canada since the 19th century.

A possible sighting in Digby County last year caused a bit of a stir, but the local natural resources technician and biologist who investigated were of the opinion that the three animals, one large and two smaller, were not cougars.

“When I watch the video,

and it’s difficult because you don’t know how far people are, it does appear to be housecats,” Galvez said.

He said the other factor was that the sighting was on Digby Neck.

“There are quite a few homes along there and it’s fairly narrow, and there were no other sightings or evidence.”

The lack of evidence doesn’t always go over well with people reporting a sighting, Galvez said.

“Often people translate that as (the Department of Natural Resources) is hiding something or they don’t believe us,” he said. “I would love to see another species or find some evidence, but it’s just not there yet.”

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2021-10-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

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