Do cougars exist in the east?

That depends on whom you ask--and how "pure" a creature you'll accept.

IN NOVEMBER 1992, biologists for the Canadian province of New Brunswick checked out a report of unusual tracks in the along a logging road within a hundred miles of the Maine border. The tracks were clawless, wider than they were long, and the walking and running strides averaged nearly four feet. One leap measured 16 feet over a clump of three-foot-high saplings whose dome of snow was unbrushed. Where logs poked above the snow, the trail led along the top of them. A scat found on top of a rock was sent to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Ontario, where elaborate microscope analysis uncovered the remains of snowshoe hares. It also identified hairs from the leg of a cougar, presumed to have been ingested when the animal groomed after eating. "There is thus little doubt," stated a letter from the museum to the biologists, "that the scat was produced by a cougar."

In a quiet way, this was revolutionary news. For most of the 20th century, the shadowy survival of cougars in eastern North America has aroused intense debate. Relentless persecution of the great cats, combined with the near extermination of deer by hunters and poachers and the denuding of vast tracts of land by loggers, drove eastern cougars to apparent extinction by the early 1900s, except for a remnant population in the swamps of southern Florida. But reports of cougars never died out. Sparse and scattered at first, they accumulated enough force to propel the eastern cougar subspecies (Puma concolor cougar) onto the list of animals protected by the 1973 Endangered Species Act. A few years later, cougar reports in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina were coming so thick and fast that local citizens threatened to file a lawsuit over clearcutting in national forests.

In response, Bob Downing, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, spent the early 1980s searching the southern Appalachians for verifiable signs of cougars. All he turned up were some unconfirmed tracks along the Blue Ridge Parkway and a few handfuls of possible scats, for which, at the time, techniques of analysis weren't advanced enough to be useful.

"I wanted to find cougars," Downing said, "and after studying the area's history, I came to believe there were a couple of places isolated enough for a few to survive, but I had to report that I was unable to confirm self-sustaining populations."

That settled the matter for the wildlife establishment, which had always been skeptical anyway.

John Lutz, founder of the Eastern Puma Network News in Baltimore, Maryland, became fascinated by the strength and elusiveness of the unknown predator on livestock in 1965, when he was working as a radio reporter. His compilation of cougar sightings and signs is the most comprehensive of the small group of believers who collect such reports. To date, Lutz has tallied well over 2,000 sightings, the bulk of them in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. More than a quarter of them specify black cats, but since no black cougars have been authenticated in North America, these sightings are a major aspect of the eastern cougar mystery. Around eight percent of the reports include kittens.

Sightings as evidence of a cougar's presence are held in very low esteem by biologists in the West. Harley Shaw, a noted cougar researcher now retired from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, has said that "after years of chasing UFOs--unidentified furry objects--I found that the human mind is a wonderful thing, and totally unreliable."

The majority of eastern cougar reports come from hunters and motorists, who catch only a fleeting glimpse of something moving on the edge of consciousness. As for tracks, few easterners have the field knowledge to distinguish cougar from bobcat, lynx, dog, fox, or coyote. Most cougar reports are surely cultural projections, drawn perhaps from guilt for the ravages of the past, from fear, thrill seeking, or sheer defiance of authority.

Nonetheless, in the mass of unconfirmable reports, a few stand out. Some are from highly credible people, including a retired director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Others are from ordinary people who described little-known aspects of cougar behavior. Such claims were vindicated by the news from New Brunswick, and not for the last time: Vermont and Maine both confirmed cougar signs in 1994.

"There may be a few cougars out there," acknowledged Paul Nickerson, endangered-species chief of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's northeastern region. "But they are not eastern cougars. The cougar recently killed in Quebec that had Chilean genes tells the story as far as I'm concerned. Somebody set it loose."

This kind of remark brings chuckles from New England cougar advocate Ted Reed. "Agency people are becoming more cautious, because they don't want to be proven wrong--like they were when they denied coyotes were moving in," he said at the first Eastern Cougar Conference, which he helped sponsor last June at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. After he saw a cougar in New Brunswick in 1974, Reed began collecting regional reports, and like John Lutz, he was rebuffed by most officials. "The agencies go through phases," he said. "Before they acknowledge that native panthers have managed to survive, they'll claim they're all escaped pets."

Once-captive cougars have a proven track record for reverting to their wild tendencies, if given the chance. "They're killing my sheep!" a woman's hearty British voice boomed over the din at a conference break. She had come from England to learn more about cougars, and passed around grisly photos of woolly carcasses. Reports of free-roaming cougars and other cats exotic to Great Britain soared after owners were forced by a 1976 law to purchase an expensive license--or get rid of their pets. There are cougars in Australia as well, rumored to have been U.S. military mascots in World War II, left behind on a continent where the only native mammals are humans and marsupials.

In the United States, an astounding legal and illegal market in pet cougars provides an indisputable source of cats for eastern forests. Endearingly cute as kittens, cougars grow into voracious, unpredictable adults, and some are turned loose by exasperated owners. Several cougars killed in the East in recent decades have been presented to authorities for examination, and proved to have characteristics of former captives. One was a female cougar killed in Pennsylvania in 1967; with her was a companion, which escaped.

Another source of cougars might be immigrants from the West, traveling northeast around the Great Lakes, then down Appalachian ridges, following the same route that coyotes are known to have taken. Cougars are believed to be moving northward; several have recently been reported in Alaska, which wasn't even mentioned as cougar range in Young and Goldman's 1946 classic, The Puma, Mysterious American Cat.

Everyone who drove to Erie for the Eastern Cougar Conference remarked on the astounding number of road-killed deer--solid evidence that the cougar's favorite prey has rebounded only too well. "Most of the East is a tremendous environmental success story, and there are really no biological factors to stop cougars from succeeding," said Dr. Rainer Brocke of the State University of New York at Syracuse. "But cougars couldn't withstand the human density. Man-induced mortality would be too great to allow enough cougars needed for a breeding population to survive." By "man-induced mortality," Brocke meant that there are too many roads on which cougars would be hit by vehicles and shot by poachers, and too many people in the woods who would shoot cougars out of fear.

"Landownership in the East is mostly in private hands," Brocke pointed out. "I advocate a land-use planning system based on 400-square-mile predator survival spaces, in which landowners willing to close roads for 50 years at a time to everyone, including themselves, are recompensed by tax reductions and other benefits." Undaunted by the clearcutting controversy, Brocke advocates clearcuts on these "predator survival spaces" of 100 to 200 acres once a century, with no other entry to those stands except once for thinning. "That would give landowners a product and predators some privacy," he said. "We have to manage for less risk of death, rather than any specific habitat conditions."

Sue Morse, a consulting forester and wildlife-habitat specialist from Jericho, Vermont, who is nationally known for her work on cougars and other predators, agreed that "Individual clearcuts, by themselves, are not necessarily bad for cougars since they produce browse for deer."

But she added another perspective as well: "We need a big-picture approach, a regional overview of land use. Harvesting patterns of huge uncontrolled patches, roads, ski slopes, anything that cuts off access among blocks of habitat means that large predators will disappear. If we consider carnivores as indicators of ecosystem health, which they are, then we need to prevent fragmentation of habitat. Citizens should insist on wildlife-sensitive planning," she continued, "and landowners should be rewarded for good stewardship. Most of all, we need to get out in the field and up in airplanes and see what connections there are and aren't, what connections we need or can enhance through good forestry practices."

Morse has founded a nonprofit organization, Keeping Track, to encourage citizens to get involved in their own landscapes, not merely by writing a check once a year to some environmental group but by participating in projects that identify critical habitat and monitor animal population trends. "It's time for our culture to make a real commitment to protection of natural resources," she said, "and the opportunities in the East are great. The eastern cougar is a symbol of the possibilities."

VIRGINIAN CHRIS BOLGIANO--writes on forestry and wildlife. In September, Stackpole Books will publish her first book, An Unnatural History of the Mountain Lion: People and Pumas in America.