'Extinct' cougar surfaces again in Louisiana
Don't look now, but another supposedly extinct cougar has surfaced in Louisiana, this one photographed in rural Vernon Parish and reported by the Associated Press.
Sightings of so-called cougars, panthers, pumas, catamounts or mountain lions — take your choice — are frequent in Louisiana but usually dismissed by official sources like the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries as figments of people's imagination — if not cases of mistaken identity.
But a trail camera last month identified a young male cougar in Vernon Parish at a deer bait site, and Maria Davidson, the LDWF's large carnivore manager, confirmed that this was indeed a big cat.
In all fairness to the LDWF, it seems to investigate plausible reports of panthers, whatever the agency's official stand, just as it did in Vernon."He (the Vernon panther) could easily be within 100 miles from here by now," Davidson said. A cougar can travel 25 miles in a night. LDWF did not give the exact location of the panther because it was on private lands.
Davidson and the LDWF continue to maintain that the Florida panther is extinct in Louisiana and that the big cats documented have either escaped from a zoo or they are migrants from Texas, which does have a small breeding population of panthers in its western parts.
Nevertheless, Louisiana people keep seeing cougars and sightings in 2008 were confirmed in Winn, Vernon and Allen parishes and a big cat was unaccountably killed by authorities in Bossier Parish. Another panther was killed in 1965 by Caddo Parish deputies near Keithville.
What we have — or had — in Louisiana was the Florida panther, a big, elusive buff-colored predator which eats a deer diet and once roamed the Southeast U.S. but is now reduced to under 50 in the Florida Everglades.
The Cougar Network says it's possible panthers from Texas are gradually moving east to reclaim former territory. This could account for the single cougars that continue to turn up in Louisiana.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has raised the subject of reintroducing Florida panthers into the Southeast, with Louisiana as a possible entry point.
But local popular opinion might defeat that idea, though there have been no known Florida panther attacks on humans.
Meanwhile, WAPT.com, a TV station in Jackson, Miss., reports that a "giant black cat" has been on the prowl in Plaquemine Parish since Katrina.Parish deputies and multiple residents have seen the allegedly seven-foot-long creature.Sounds like a project for television's Monster Quest to me.
Wiley Hilburn Jr. is professor emeritus and the former chair of the journalism department at Louisiana Tech University. Write to him at the Louisiana Tech Department of Journalism, P.O. Box 10258, Ruston, LA, 71272, or e-mail him at stringer@latech.edu.
But a trail camera last month identified a young male cougar in Vernon Parish at a deer bait site, and Maria Davidson, the LDWF's large carnivore manager, confirmed that this was indeed a big cat.
In all fairness to the LDWF, it seems to investigate plausible reports of panthers, whatever the agency's official stand, just as it did in Vernon."He (the Vernon panther) could easily be within 100 miles from here by now," Davidson said. A cougar can travel 25 miles in a night. LDWF did not give the exact location of the panther because it was on private lands.
Davidson and the LDWF continue to maintain that the Florida panther is extinct in Louisiana and that the big cats documented have either escaped from a zoo or they are migrants from Texas, which does have a small breeding population of panthers in its western parts.
Nevertheless, Louisiana people keep seeing cougars and sightings in 2008 were confirmed in Winn, Vernon and Allen parishes and a big cat was unaccountably killed by authorities in Bossier Parish. Another panther was killed in 1965 by Caddo Parish deputies near Keithville.
What we have — or had — in Louisiana was the Florida panther, a big, elusive buff-colored predator which eats a deer diet and once roamed the Southeast U.S. but is now reduced to under 50 in the Florida Everglades.
The Cougar Network says it's possible panthers from Texas are gradually moving east to reclaim former territory. This could account for the single cougars that continue to turn up in Louisiana.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has raised the subject of reintroducing Florida panthers into the Southeast, with Louisiana as a possible entry point.
But local popular opinion might defeat that idea, though there have been no known Florida panther attacks on humans.
Meanwhile, WAPT.com, a TV station in Jackson, Miss., reports that a "giant black cat" has been on the prowl in Plaquemine Parish since Katrina.Parish deputies and multiple residents have seen the allegedly seven-foot-long creature.Sounds like a project for television's Monster Quest to me.
Wiley Hilburn Jr. is professor emeritus and the former chair of the journalism department at Louisiana Tech University. Write to him at the Louisiana Tech Department of Journalism, P.O. Box 10258, Ruston, LA, 71272, or e-mail him at stringer@latech.edu.
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