In the 1970s, I became a regional biologist on eastern Nova Scotia’s mainland. At the time, biologists were new additions to the province’s field staff.
An elderly gentleman from Guysborough County soon called and met me one day in the Antigonish office. Milt Gillie was a trapper with a chilling story. Successful on a cold winter’s day in the 1940s, he began to drag a beaver carcass across a lake on the ice. To his surprise and alarm, a cougar came out of the woods towards him. It wanted that beaver. Threats and counter threats were issued as Milt snowshoed his way across the lake, but Milt held his ground (and the beaver). When he reached the other side, the cougar gave up and disappeared.
Milt’s story was the first and oldest of hundreds of cougar stories that I’ve heard. Fifty years ago, Bruce S. Wright was a director of the Northeast Wildlife Station, University of New Brunswick, in Fredericton. He collected many people’s observations in a series of papers and books. In 1972, he published The Eastern Panther, A Question of Survival. Shortly before he died, Wright saw a cougar crossing a road.
Scientifically it’s Felis concolor, but common names include panther, cougar, puma, and mountain lion. I’ll use cougar. One quick point: cougars and domestic cats have long tails, while bobcats and lynx have short stubs for tails. No other wild cats in northeastern North America have long tails.
Cougars usually live for about 12 years, ranging over territories as large as 220 square kilometres. Females generally weigh around 18 kilograms. Males can weigh more than 60 kilograms and measure in excess of two metres from head to tip of tail. That’s a big cat. When Europeans began to come ashore here in the 1600s, wolves and cougars were two dominant, wide-ranging predators killing moose, caribou, and deer. The new arrivals began clearing forests and using guns to kill wild game for food. They also pastured domestic animals. With wild game disappearing, cougars and wolves shifted to killing cows, horses, and pigs. For pioneer settlers, survival became a matter of us or them.
Persecution characterized the 18th and 19th centuries. Any surviving cougar or wolf in that time must have taught their youngsters that humans were bad medicine. Officially, cougars were extirpated (eliminated) from Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island centuries ago.
Why, then, have so many folks contacted me over five decades regarding what they believe to be cougar sightings? In January 2018, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took the eastern cougar off the list of endangered species. Mark McMullough, a biologist in Maine, said, “There were animals from time to time that would show up … but no breeding population.”
Half a century ago, officials determined local cougar body parts turned into Nova Scotia’s Wildlife Division were a western subspecies, declaring them fraudulent. More recently, scientists have determined that there is no genetic difference; only one species exists across North America. So why might cougars be here?
Food sources
The last 100 years have seen an influx of white-tailed deer into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. A prime food target for cougars, white tails have become common.
Wanderlust
There’s recent evidence that cougars travel considerable distances. A young, tagged male from the Black Hills, South Dakota population was first sighted in Wisconsin on December 11, 2009. It continued eastward and was noted again in Michigan on May 20, 2010. The same cat was killed on the Wilbur Cross Parkway near Milford, Connecticut on June 11, 2011. It had travelled approximately 2,880 kilometres. At time of death, this cat weighed 64 kilograms.
Escaped Pets
Some biologists suggest that validated sightings in the east are either actual pet cougars that have been released or escaped, or the offspring of once-captive pets. If these individuals have the correct genetic makeup and are breeding, this argument about cougars in the east becomes academic.
Breeding evidence
On the evening of February 21, 2019, Lindsay Trask of Tiddville, Digby County, N.S., shot a video of tawny creatures with long tails making their way past trees through snow, down a hillside about 100 metres away. There were three sets of smaller tracks and one set more than twice the size of a domestic cat track. Noting the paw print differences between house cats and cougars, then Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History zoologist Andrew Hebda suggested that the group was a mother cougar with kittens from the previous year. Natural Resources staff said no, despite photographic evidence of paw prints. One wonders, why would they say that?
Status risks development versus habitat issues
Large at-risk mammals with vast territories or long migrations become problematic for federal and provincial governments if they attempt to enforce endangered species laws. Such animals and plants represent serious impediments for fossil fuel, energy, mining and industrial forest company developments. Laws may exist on paper, but defining and setting aside core habitats for a species is essential for their survival. Nature requires space and time, while politicians operate on a four-year election horizon.
As an example, in 2003 the Nova Scotia Endangered Species Act added mainland moose to its list of species at risk. Nature Nova Scotia and two of its organizations went to court in 2019, asking a Supreme Court judge to require the provincial government to enforce its own Endangered Species Act. The judge agreed in 2020, but nature still didn’t win. In 2021, the minister of natural resources and renewables approved the Mainland Moose Recovery Action Plan. But, as of this writing, not one square centimetre of core moose habitat has ever been declared by any minister of natural resources and renewables. Instead, the last 21 years has been good clear-cutting time, with moose-inhabited forests on Crown lands being plundered for private forest company profits, willfully sanctioned by government approvals. Add mining, biomass, and windfarm endeavours. There’s money being made wrecking essential at-risk habitats.
Cougars are large mammals, hunting in extensive home territories. Admitting their existence would necessitate a cougar recovery plan with core habitats that, practically speaking, would probably never be set aside for their survival. Habitats lose against money. We need to shift governments and economies to make them no longer dependent upon trashing the land and spoiling the air and water.
The mystery continues
For the record, on Sept. 1, 2009, I was driving at 11:00 a.m. near Bayfield, N.S., and saw my first cougar striding along a side road, in plain view.
On November 2, 2010, my neighbour, Joan, called to say that a large beige cat with a very long tail had just come out of my south field and crossed the Monks Head Road. I found soft pad marks following two sets of deer tracks that disappeared into alders.
On July 12, 2021, I was towing a travel trailer towards Amherst on Hwy. 104 in the Cobequid Pass. My wife, Alice, was following in our car. There, on the side of the road, was a dead cougar.
I couldn’t stop. Arriving at Aulac, N.B., for fuel, Alice’s first words were, “Did you see the dead cougar?”
Mr. Gillie and many good citizens saw them. Perhaps the question should be: “Are cougars back, or did they never leave?”