LATEST SIGHTINGS
After The Post and Courier ran a story about the difficulty of establishing whether cougars or mountain lions exist in the Lowcountry, we were inundated with new eyewitness accounts. As a result, we've published a new map that you can find at Charleston.net
Feel free to add your sightings here, and we'll update the map as we go along.
posted by Tony Bartelme at 4:19 PM
6 Comments:
There are some people in the Lowcountry who are thinking about an organized effort to determine whether cougars do exist here. I'll report on that if a group does actually form. In the meantime, here's a recent story from Smithsonian Magazine about work being done out West to track jaguars.
http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2005/december/phenomena.php
Return of the Jaguar?
Novel camera traps have documented the elusive cat in Arizona, suggesting it may not be gone from the United States after all
By Will Rizzo
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The paw print, judging from the size of it, was left by a large cat just a day or two earlier. Emil McCain kneels over it in the sandy bottom of an Arizona canyon a mile from the U.S.-Mexico border. "This isn't a mountain lion track," McCain says, shaking his head after measuring and then tracing it onto a piece of plexiglass.
The print is huge, four-toed and without claws, like that of a large mountain lion. But the heel pad is too big for a mountain lion, the toes too close to the back pad.
We follow the cat's trail below camel-colored rimrock and live oaks to where it passes an automated camera. For the past year, McCain has operated nearly 30 heat-triggered cameras in these remote mountains that connect the U.S. borderlands to Mexico's northernmost Sierra Madre. When the film is developed days later, McCain's instincts are proved correct. The cat isn't a mountain lion—it's a jaguar, low slung and powerful, moving past yucca and volcanic rock, its eyes reflecting gold in the camera's flash.
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For four years, camera traps operated by the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project, based in Amado, Arizona, have documented two jaguars in these high, arid washes. They may have caught a third animal on film—the cat appears differently patterned than the others. If it is a female, it would be the first one known in the United States in 40 years. It's possible the cats were here all along, unnoticed, or they may be visitors from Mexico. It's also possible that jaguars are returning to—and breeding in—the United States.
The jaguar's range historically extended from northeastern Argentina through Brazil, Central America and Mexico, and followed the mountains along Mexico's Pacific and gulf coasts into Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. But the animals lost ground in the past century. In 1963, a hunter in Arizona's White Mountains shot a female, the last of her sex to be documented in the United States. Two years later, the last legally killed jaguar, a male, was taken by a deer hunter in the Patagonia Mountains, south of Tucson.
In 1969, Arizona outlawed most jaguar hunting, but with no females known to be at large, there was little hope the population could rebound. During the next 25 years, only two jaguars were documented in the United States, both killed: a large male shot in 1971 near the Santa Cruz River by two teenage duck hunters, and another male cornered by hounds in the Dos Cabezas Mountains in 1986.
The animals' prospects brightened in 1996, when Warner Glenn, a rancher and hunting guide from Douglas, Arizona, came across a jaguar in the Peloncillo Mountains of southeastern Arizona. Catching the jaguar on a ledge, Glenn snapped a few pictures, pulled back his hounds and allowed the animal to stride away. Six months later and 150 miles to the west, Tucson houndsmen Jack Childs and Matt Colvin treed a second jaguar near the reservation of the Tohono O’odham Nation. The cat, about 150 pounds and groggy from feeding, allowed himself to be videotaped for an hour.
Not long after Childs' surprise encounter, the hunter became a jaguar researcher, even traveling to Brazil's Pantanal wilderness to study the cats. In 1999, he began placing remote cameras in Arizona where jaguars had been seen in the past. By December 2001, he had his first jaguar photograph: a male weighing between 130 and 150 pounds and later dubbed Macho A. The jaguar looked healthy, well fed and heavily built, with a broad, wide skull that flowed back to a torso shaped like a cylinder of muscle. Macho A turned up on film in August 2003, and again in September 2004. Childs and McCain have since picked up a second male, Macho B, and possibly a third animal.
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Experts disagree about what the photographs signify. Alan Rabinowitz of the Wildlife Conservation Society says the animals may merely be dispersing from a dwindling population in Sonora, Mexico, about 130 miles south of Douglas, Arizona. "I think that the [Sonora] population is in serious trouble, and we're almost seeing it act like an organism reaching out and trying its hardest to survive in any way possible." But some of the photographs suggest otherwise. Macho B's canine teeth are yellow and worn, indicating that the cat is 4 to 6 years old, well past the age when he would leave his home turf, McCain says. And if the third camera-trap sighting is of a female jaguar, there's a chance the animals are mating. Craig Miller, a conservationist at Defenders of Wildlife, is hopeful that the U.S. population might recover. "For every one of those jaguars photographed, it could represent two or three more in adjacent habitat," he says.
In March 2003, a Mexico City-based conservation organization called Naturalia purchased a 10,000-acre ranch in Sonora to serve as the core of a private jaguar reserve. Mexican president Vicente Fox proclaimed 2005 the year of the jaguar, and an international convention was held in October on management of the cat.
Latest sighting reports ... Three paddlers recently saw what they said was a cougar with a long tail off Doar Road in Awendaw, S.C. Unfortunately, they didn't have their cameras at the ready. We also received a report about a deer hung in a tree at Seabrook Island, where we've received a dozen sighting reports over the years.
FRESH SIGHTING! On June 22, Jimmy Mazcyk, a firefighter on duty on Seabrook Island, spotted what he described as a cougar across from the station - a cat four-times the size of a normal cat with a tail three feet long. He spotted some tracks as well. More than a dozen people have told The Post and Courier that they've seen cougars on Seabrook in recent years.
Update on fresh sighting...Three independent experts say it's a... bobcat.
Tuesday 08/01/06 I had a large cat cross highway 9 at 7:20 Pm.
It was near Green Seas Sc. exactly
where hwy 9 widens to 4 lanes.
I was east bound. It was not a cougar but it also was not a Bob Cat. brown on the back had dark spots on the underside. tail about 3 feet long with a 4 foot body estimated weight around 50 to 60 pounds
Here's a story in The State Newspaper on Sat, Jan. 27, 2007
‘Life-changing event’: Panther chases forester
By SAMMY FRETWELL
sfretwell@thestate.com
A federal forester says he was chased into the Chattooga River by a 7-foot-long panther with “jet black” fur.
Terrance Fletcher, a technician with the U.S. Forest Service, dove into the frigid water and crawled up the bank in South Carolina to escape.
“The animal started running ... so I decided to run and get away and jump in the river to get across to the other side,” Fletcher said this week. “It was a life-changing event for me.”
The incident occurred the second week in January along the mountain river separating Georgia and South Carolina.
Black panthers are not native to the southeastern United States, meaning Fletcher might have seen a river otter or a bobcat, state wildlife officials in Georgia and South Carolina said.
Still, Fletcher and Forest Service District Ranger Dave Jensen said they think he saw some sort of large cat on the Georgia side of the river.
“It was a little too big to be a bobcat,” Fletcher said. “My first impression was a panther.”
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources found no evidence of large cat tracks in the area where Fletcher said he saw the animal, but the Georgia DNR’s Kevin Lowrey said it’s possible a black panther was lurking in the woods.
If so, it was probably an exotic pet that escaped, he said. His agency regularly receives reports of people seeing cougars, large tawny cats that were once native to Georgia and South Carolina. Officials say the creatures are likely escaped pet cougars or other animals, rather than wild cougars.
“We don’t have a native black cat in the United States,” Lowrey said. “That just tells me it was something released.”
Lowrey, a wildlife biologist with the Georgia agency, said people hiking or fishing along the Chattooga River should not be overly concerned. The river is the only federally designated wild and scenic river in South Carolina, and it is popular with recreational enthusiasts.
Lowrey said folks should always be aware of their surroundings when in the forest.
Fletcher, a 24-year-old Alabama native, said he and another Forest Service technician were surveying trails on the Georgia side of the river south of the Burrells Ford bridge when they separated.
While taking a break near the river bank, Fletcher heard rustling in the woods and looked in that direction. Staring back at him was what appeared to be a black panther, crouched on the forest floor like a house cat stalking a bird, he said.
When he stood up, the cat started running, prompting him to take the icy dip in the Chattooga. Soaked to the skin and freezing, he met up with his partner and walked through the woods to their Forest Service truck.
“We just got on out of there,” Fletcher said, adding he remains a bit spooked by the incident. “I don’t know how long (the feeling) will last.”
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