[Original headline: Was that a mountain lion in Henrietta?]

Video is unclear, but animal control officer is sure of sighting

Exotic animal sightings here aren't really rare

A Gila monster on the shore of Hemlock Lake. Another caught in chicken coop in Groveland, Livingston County.

An escaped African lion in Farmington, Ontario County. Australian wallabies in Webster.

The headless body of an alligator found in Springwater, Livingston County. A dead shark in Irondequoit Bay. Tropical fish in the Erie Canal.

Sightings of strange animals near the Flower City, like those above, turn out to be true.

Others remain apocryphal. During the 19th century, Wyoming County's Silver Lake was the reputed lair of a serpent-like sea monster.

And in 1977, in Chemung County, screeching cries in the night, broad tracks and slaughtered farm animals led to a spate of stories about "the Van Etten swamp monster." The legend was short-lived, once the creature moved on. But experts concluded it was an escaped mountain lion.

Sightings of unusual wildlife sometimes prompt amused skepticism from area experts.

Bruce Penrod, a senior DEC wildlife biologist in Bath, Steuben County, once rode out to a house where a man said a black bear had been treed by three circling wolves.

"After we looked at the (drug) paraphernalia on his table, we figured there might be a correlation," he said.

But the truth can be strange enough by itself, said Penrod. He once took a call from a woman who had been breastfeeding a rescued baby squirrel.

At Lollypop Farm, 99 Victor Road, Perinton, strange animal tales are a reality.

There are about 35 abandoned Vietnamese potbellied pigs on hand, said executive director Jim Tedford.

Once grown, he said, the Southeast Asian pigs get aggressive, root up linoleum floors and learn to open refrigerators.

Tedford's only brush with a mountain lion came a few years ago at an animal shelter in Tennessee.

A kitten, tied to a coal bin and eating cat chow, was rescued from its owner, an ex-con.

But the owner won a court battle to get the mountain lion back, said Tedford, and eventually traded it for a car.

In Henrietta, a suburb that blends the suburban and the rural, animal inhabitants include cows, horses, raccoons, dogs, cats -- and a mountain lion. Maybe.

A Brooks Road family, whose house borders about 20 acres of meadow and woods, last month spotted what looked like a mountain lion.

"It was like watching the lions in the zoo," said Maria Martinez, whose husband, Horacio, videotaped the animal in their back yard on May 13.

Maria Martinez first saw the animal about 100 feet away and described it as muscular, about 100 pounds, caramel-colored and around 20 inches tall, with a long, narrow dark-tipped tail.

Officially, mountain lions last inhabited New York in 1903. Their range is now thought to be only along the west coast of North and South America and in wild pockets of the Florida everglades.

The Martinez family's two-minute videotape of the sinuous creature with a ropy tail was taken from about 200 feet away or more, as it crept over a meadow toward a line of woods.

The tape failed to convince wildlife experts at the regional office of the state Department of Environmental Conservation that there is a Felia concolor in a Rochester suburb.

But the tape is one more compelling item in a string of sightings in the last five years that has one local official convinced there is not only one mountain lion roaming in the Rochester area, but a breeding pair that has had kittens.

"Definitely," said Toni Doerr, the Town of Riga's dog control officer.

Since 1995, Doerr has recorded 32 sightings in the Churchville-Mumford-Mendon area.

Most descriptions are of a tawny cat-like animal with a muscular body.

Proof of a resident mountain lion may emerge this month, said Doerr, who submitted a scat (excrement) sample to an out-of-state laboratory in May.

The droppings, found near Riga-Mumford Road, will be tested for a DNA match to a mountain lion.

Meanwhile, another string of sightings in May, noted in a DEC file, occurred in Rochester, Henrietta and in Avon, Livingston County and Manchester, Ontario County.

In the past five years, DEC records show, calls about alleged mountain lions have come from Livingston County's Wayland, Springwater and Lima and from Sweden, Ogden and Churchville.

And there has been a bubble of similar sightings -- three in the last week of April or in early May -- near Eden, Erie County, just south of Buffalo.

"But we have yet to have a real good confirmation," said Russ Biss, the DEC's Buffalo-area regional wildlife manager.

To experts, proof might include scat, fur, good tracks, remains of prey, a clear videotape -- or a body.

In California, where there are up to 5,000 mountain lions in the wild, the animals -- elusive, shy and not car-savvy -- are frequent roadkill.

Mountain lions, which feed on deer and smaller mammals, can have a hunting range up to 100 miles in circumference.

"Once one person sees (a mountain lion), everyone sees one," said a skeptical David O'Dell, chief wildlife biologist for the regional DEC and a 30-year expert on animals.

If there is a mountain lion out there, he said, it's an animal that escaped captivity.

O'Dell's take on the Martinez tape: It was a housecat. "People aren't trained (wildlife) observers," he said.

"There's no doubt in my mind what I saw," said Ralph Bellucco Jr., a retired Rochester police detective and now a private investigator.

He claims two sightings of the animals in a four-year period, near his hunting camp in Prattsburg, Steuben County.

During bow season in the fall of 1997, "a mountain lion almost ran right in front of me," he said. "I had a good eyeball of it."

Bellucco described the animal as tan, muscular, about 100 pounds, with a head that seemed small for its body.

Stanley "Tex" McDougal, who farms in the same area near Bean Station Road, said he was "pretty sure" he saw a similar animal cross the field last year.

"It was too big to be a coyote or a fox," he said. During the 1980s, McDougal said, he saw what was "definitely a big cat" from a treetop deer stand.

In April, Linda Groves, a librarian at the Rochester Institute of Technology, saw what appeared to be a mountain lion on Scottsville Road, about 400 feet from campus. It was nearly 10 p.m. when she saw it from her car on the shoulder of the road, less than 20 feet away.

Its ears were thick and rounded, she said, and it was about the size of a 110-pound Rhodesian ridgeback dog she once had. The mountain lion, backlit by lights from a mini-storage area, had a wide neck and thin legs. "The face was definitely mountain lion-like," said Groves, who turned back to look at the animal.

"I've never seen a mountain lion," said a skeptical Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum in Albany. "And people I trust have never seen one."

But if such an animal escaped into the wild, he said, it would have a fair chance of surviving in New York.

The state is 62 percent wooded and deer populations are booming.

Doerr calls official skepticism about local mountain lions "a UFO thing. Everybody (who sees one) is either crazy, drunk or doesn't know what they're talking about."

But she is driven to find an answer because the reports are so persistent. "Every day," said Doerr, "is a learning day."