Mythical Cougar
Still Haunts Canada's Maritimes[Original headline: Sightings of rare, ghostly eastern cougar still haunt Maritime forests]
FREDERICTON (CP) -- A fleeting form on a back country road; a chilling screech on a dark, spring night.
Are these clues to solve one of New Brunswick's most enduring mysteries, or simply figments of busy imaginations eager to experience a legend?
The experts are divided, but people who say they have seen the almost mythical eastern cougar swear it's no will-o'-the-wisp.
People such as Fredericton businessman David Kileel, who says what he saw one day sitting on a bank of New Brunswick's Miramichi River was no folk legend, but a flesh and fanged eastern cougar -- and the skeptics be damned.
"He was just sitting there in the sunset, watching me," says Kileel, who was in a canoe on the river only a few metres from shore.
"I had a really good look at him. He finally got up and went for a stroll along the shore of the river and then he turned off and went back into the swale.
"He was tawny-coloured and big, a good six feet long (two metres) from nose to tip of the tail. My God, he was beautiful."
Kileel's sighting was several years ago and he still regrets that he had only a fishing rod in his hand, no camera or any means of producing the kind of concrete proof scientists say they need to verify the existence of cougars in the wilds of Eastern Canada.
For decades, there have been reports of sightings of eastern cougars, the so-called ghost of the New Brunswick woods.
The last physical evidence of an eastern cougar was in 1938 when one was shot dead near the Maine-New Brunswick border.
The animals look like western mountain lions. They have the distinctive long tail and they're tawny-colored, although there have been numerous reports of very dark and even black ones.
There have been hundreds of sightings of the large cats since 1938. In recent years, reports have increased as more and more people in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and New England tell authorities they have seen the elusive animal.
Some suggest the big cats are making a comeback, moving east and south just as coyotes have done in recent years.
Wildlife biologists always have been skeptical, pointing out that despite the many sightings, a cougar has never been trapped, hit by a car or shot -- at least not since 1938.
In many ways, the eastern cougar story is like the Bigfoot mystery: hundreds of sightings and even a few footprints and photos, but without a body to examine, everything is hypothetical.
"We've had just too many reputable sightings to totally dismiss the suggestion that they are here," says Diane Amirault, a wildlife biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Sackville, N.B.
"But there is no concrete proof of a population that is able to sustain itself."
At least some of the scientific skepticism about the eastern cougar was laid to rest by two developments in the last decade.
The first occurred on the outskirts of Fredericton in a small farming community called Rusagonis where Roger Noble and his family live.
Noble and several of his relatives were enjoying a backyard barbecue one summer day in 1991 when a large cat was spotted in a field near the family home.
Noble reached for a video camera belonging to one of his relatives, moved as close as he could to what he says was a cougar and fumbled with the camera to start shooting.
Unfamiliar with the device, Noble's first, and probably his best shots, were taken with the camera stalled in pause. He finally got the equipment working and managed to get some footage of the animal as it strolled away from the area.
The video has been shown to experts throughout North America. It convinced many, but left some wondering if the creature wasn't just a large, orange pussycat.
Noble has no doubts.
"There's no question in my mind," he says. "I saw and filmed a cougar."
The second development took place in 1992 when woodsmen working near Juniper, in northern New Brunswick, called authorities with a report of a cougar sighting.
Wildlife biologists raced to the scene and found fresh tracks which they followed for several kilometres.
Rod Cumberland of New Brunswick's Natural Resources Department was one of the people who tracked the animal. He never spotted the cat, but Cumberland says it was definitely a cougar.
"The tracks we saw had certain characteristics, including a four-foot stride," he says. "They stand on their own as proof."
In 1993, a woman reported seeing what she described as a huge, black panther near her home in Cormierville in southeastern New Brunswick. The sighting was later confirmed by wildlife biologists who found tracks.
Roughly 30 to 40 per cent of reported sightings in New Brunswick are of black cougars, although the only known wild black cat is the South American panther.
Amirault says it's possible a small population of cougars could produce a genetic abnormality such as black coats.
"We still get reports of black cats," she says. "It's always possible in any natural population there are mutations that result in melanistic (black pigmentation) cougars."
Amirault says one of the most convincing sightings of eastern cougars came from a Western Canadian family camping in Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Highlands National Park a couple of years ago.
She says family members were amazed when they saw a female cougar and several kittens near their campsite.
The family reported the sighting to park wardens several days later as they were leaving, adding they were surprised to discover the Maritimes had cougars just like the West.
So were the park wardens.
"This was a very reputable sighting," says Amirault. "These people are very familiar with what a cougar looks like. A lot of people who see a large wild cat, they'll just call it a cougar. They don't know."
The cougar may be behind one of New Brunswick's most enduring folk legends, a ghost story known as the Dungarvon Whooper.
Fredericton writer Peter Clark, who has collected and published several books of New Brunswick legend and lore, says the Dungarvon Whooper is supposed to be the restless ghost of a murdered man who worked in a lumber camp many years ago.
People who live near the Dungarvon River in the Miramichi region of central New Brunswick occasionally hear blood-curdling screams late at night. The story has grown that it's the ghost of the murdered man, whose body is buried in the woods.
Clark himself has heard the screams, but he thinks it's likely a cougar.
"What I heard was a screeching whoop, which would have woken up the dead," says Clark.
"It was a really eerie series of cries."
Officially, the eastern cougar has never been declared extinct but long was listed as endangered. Recently, that was changed from endangered to indeterminate, meaning there isn't enough scientific data to establish the cougar's status.
But many New Brunswickers hope there is still a breeding population of the shy, beautiful animals living in the province's dark forests.
"Anything so rare is precious," says Kileel.
"They have a special mystique. There is no other animal like them in the New Brunswick woods."
• Story originally published by •
C-News / Canada - July 12 2001
