Nva Scotia Cougar sightings similar to those in the Eastern USA................Everyone is positive that what they see in the woods is a Cougar.......................where is the hard evidence?

No cougars in Nova Scotia? Really?

Dozens of credible sightings of the elusive cats indicate otherwise

By ED COLEMAN 

A cougar yawns at a zoo in Massachusetts. Cougar sightings in the wild in Nova Scotia are common, but provincial wildlife officials are unconvinced. (Lisa Poole / AP)

Don't try telling Grace and Harley Corkum there are no cougars in Nova Scotia.

On a spring morning a few years ago, Harley was working in the yard of his Hall's Harbour farm in Kings County when his dog started yowling and circling around him. "It was really upset and it pressed close to me," Corkum said. "It made the strangest noises I ever heard in a dog."

Corkum quickly discovered what was disturbing the dog. In the driveway 40 metres away, panting like it had been running hard, stood a large cat the size, shape and colour of an animal he recognized as a cougar. His wife Grace came out of the house at that moment to see what was wrong with the dog and saw the animal too. Recalling the incident later when I talked with him, Corkum said the animal stood in his driveway for several seconds before bounding away into nearby woods. The Corkums had a good look at the animal and both believe it was a cougar. "It was a big animal with a long tail. It looked like a cougar I saw at the Shubenacadie wildlife park," Harley said.

I've recorded cougar sightings in western Nova Scotia since 1960 and the Corkum incident is typical. Generally when sightings occur, investigators pass them off as inconclusive. Such was the case with the Corkum sighting. "After I reported the sighting to Natural Resources, Harley said, "I got a letter back saying I didn't see a cougar, that there aren't any here."

Such also was the case with a sighting made about the same time a few miles west of the Corkum farm. Myrtle Whitney was looking out the kitchen window of her home on West Hall's Harbour Road when she spied a large animal curled up on the sunlit slope of a horse pasture.

"I thought it was a good-sized dog at first but there was something different about it," Whitney said. The animal was about 100 metres away and Whitney trained a camcorder on it and zoomed in. Her video, which runs about 30 seconds, caught a tawny-coloured cat that got up and strolled into the woods.

Whitney's convinced it was a cougar. "It was much bigger than a housecat," she said. For the record, I looked at the video and if it wasn't a cougar, there are some mighty big housecats on the Hall's Harbour Mountain. However, Department of Natural Resources officials viewed the video and measured vegetation in the pasture to determine the size of the animal Whitney saw. The department concluded that while it isn't definite, most likely what Whitney filmed was a housecat.

Like the Corkum sighting, the official reaction to the Whitney videotape was also typical. Most sightings are shrugged off by biologists as hallucinations, housecats or dogs; or as "inconclusive," a word used by wildlife experts when they can't explain something. However, many cougar sightings are convincing. Also convincing are sightings made when a couple of people see the same animal and have lots of time to look it over.

Last year, Kings County farmer Kendall Best was driving along a woods road with a friend when a large animal came out of the bush, stopped and turned broadside. Best and Bruce Ross had a long look at the animal. "We had lots of time to discuss what we were seeing," Best says, "and we agreed it was a cougar."

To date, no one has collected the necessary evidence, a cougar specimen, to prove they exist in the wilds. Until such evidence is obtained, some 200 or more cougar sightings in Nova Scotia are being treated as errors. But is there evidence, other than sightings, that cougars exist here?

Enter Lloyd Duncanson of Grand Pre. While he's never seen a cougar, he's found other evidence the cat roams the province. A former curator of exhibits at the province's Museum of Natural History, Duncanson worked in the wild for most of his 36-year career with the museum and has trapped for over 50 years in woods and dykelands. "Cougars have always been here," says Duncanson. "While trapping I've walked on cougar tracks five times."

Duncanson says cougar tracks differ from dog or coyote tracks and there's no mistaking them. He made a plaster cast of one of the sets of cougar tracks he discovered and turned it over to the Department of Natural Resources. On another occasion, following a set of tracks he identified as a cougar, Duncanson found where the cat defecated and collected a stool sample. This was also turned over to Natural Resources but Duncanson says he has never heard anything back.

Enter also Bobby Rockwell of Waterville, Kings County, a houndsman of many years experience. Several years ago Rockwell was asked to look at two sets of tracks a friend found in the snow on the North Mountain. The tracks, the largest measuring 11 centimetres, were discovered by Corey Scotney of Aylesford. Scotney asked Rockwell to help identify the tracks and put his hounds on them.The tracks were too old for the hounds to take, but deciding they were made by cougars, Rockwell and Scotney sought confirmation from another source. Gail Rogerson of Oaklawn Farm Zoo was called in to look at the tracks. She confirmed they were made by cougars. Rogerson said she based this on her experience with cougars at the zoo. "I've looked at cougar tracks in our pens for 20 years," she said, "and yes, there's no mistake."

However, despite the sightings and the tracks, wildlife experts still say cougars are not found in the province, despite the 244 sightings recorded in Nova Scotia up until the 1990s by the Canadian Wildlife Service, and despite numerous sightings since. But just in case the experts are wrong, legislation was passed a few years ago placing cougars on the list of protected animals. Given this legislation, perhaps sightings and tracks are credible evidence after all that cougars are here.

'We had lots of time to discuss what we were seeing, and we agreed

it was a cougar.'