Cougars on the prowl

The very first cougar-sighting story I heard took place in my late teens. Some friends and I were working in a seedling greenhouse in Pass Lake, a rural community just east of Thunder Bay. We spent our days thinning seedlings and talking. A couple of the locals worked with us and the chat turned to strange sightings. “There is a panther that lives around here,” said one of the young women. “I’ve seen it a few times running across the road. It has a long tail.” The other local working with her nodded her head in agreement. They didn’t seem to have any doubt about what they saw. Although I knew the odds of an actual panther living in the northwest were low, this was the first outright mention of the existence of a large wild cat (at least larger than a lynx) in northwestern Ontario that stayed with me. Could it be? Could there actually be large cats in northwestern Ontario? Were cougars slinking through the woods I hunted and fished in? Sighting cougars Since that initial story, some 35 years ago, cougar sightings have continued to come in. Once I began my career as a journalist and broadcaster, tips, sightings, and other cougar-related information flowed in steadily. Some of them seemed legit, others, not so much. Among the more dubious hot tips was a manila envelope with a very detailed account of how a cougar had been in this lady’s yard in rural Thunder Bay, frightening her. She thought I needed to know. A picture was enclosed. It was quite clearly a house cat. Another, potentially more serious situation, happened in August of 2012, in Thunder Bay. A woman reported a cougar running loose in the city and alerted animal control. The “cougar” sightings were reported near a seniors’ home and a daycare. Police services made the unusual move of alerting the public to a possible cougar roaming the city. As you can imagine, the ensuing news reports — widely shared on social media — created a frenzy. But, when a video of the animal in question was filmed and shown on Facebook, things quieted down. The “cougar” was a fox with a bad limp. Large cat tracks Not all cougar sightings and reports have been so flawed. In the early 1990s, a respected biologist with the Ministry of Natural Resources (as it was called then), found tracks