By Michael Bielawski
A large wild cat known as the catamount went extinct in Vermont nearly a century and a half ago, the last documented killing of the species in the state was by a hunter on Nov. 21, 1881, state Fish & Wildlife officials say.
David Sausville, the Wildlife Management Program Manager for their Essex Junction Office, spoke with VDC about the species.
“That is the information we have, back in 1881 in the Town of Barnard was the last confirmed animal, and it was shot at that time,” Sausville said.
According to the Vermont Historical Society, on Thanksgiving Day in 1881, a boy named James Cadwell was hunting in Barnard. He noticed tracks in the snow and started following them. After awhile, he saw what had made the tracks – a huge panther! Cadwell asked Alexander Crowell, a hunter, for help.
After they tracked the animal, Crowell shot the panther twice. First he shot the panther in the leg with a shot gun. Then he grabbed a rifle from another hunter and shot the panther in the head.
There have been reported sightings since – but nothing confirmed, Sausville said.
“We don’t have any confirmed citings, we get reports every year of people seeing mountain lions but nobody has ever been able to provide us with any type of evidence to date of their presence,” he said. “We don’t ever say never but nobody ever brought in any skins or hair to be tested and we’ve never had any of the animals hit on the highways.”
He said there are a lot of outdoor cameras nowadays that hunters use to monitor wildlife and those have also failed to capture any catamounts.
The large cat also widely known as a mountain lion is not extinct worldwide. Sausville explained.
“Just in different portions of the northeast, the population was eliminated here back in the 1800s but we have mountain lions out in the western part of the U.S. and they are doing very well,” he said. “We even have hunting seasons for them in some of the states so they are not worried about them.”
A long cat journey
There was one male catamount that was spotted about a decade ago in Connecticut, it was unfortunately hit by a car. Using tracking and DNA testing it was determined that the cat had traveled all the way from South Dakota.
“It’s very unusual for them to roam that far but they do come east sometimes from that way,” he said. “If you think about all the urban areas that it had to sneak through … It’s pretty incredible that it made it that far honestly.”
Vermont has lots of bobcats
He talked about some of the large cats that are in Vermont.
“Bobcats are very common in this state, especially in more your valley areas where they have more small mammals and things like that, cottontail rabbits and a higher percentage of mice, they are doing well,” he said.
He said the animals are largely nocturnal, but they may be most active when the sun is low in the sky.
“They do a lot of their work at night … they are very more active towards evening hours, low daylight, and during morning hours,” he said.
He said the best time to see them is after a fresh snow.
“And I’ve seen several of them … a lot of people don’t see them and think they are rare but if they go out after a fresh snow or light dustings you will see bobcat tracks in many areas.”
Canadian lynx have been seen on occasion in Vermont but there haven’t been any sightings for a while.
The decision to formally declare the species regionally extinct was nearly a decade ago.
“Catamounts are considered extinct,” stated an Associated Press report in June of 2015. “In 2015 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggested removing the eastern cougar [known to some as a catamount] from the list of endangered species, ‘declaring that the cougars have likely been extinct for at least 70 years.’”
According to VermontHistoryExplorer.org, part of what doomed the large cat in Vermont was its reputation for killing livestock.
“On this day, Alexander Crowell shot and killed the last catamount in Vermont. In the wild, catamounts ate deer and other animals,” the report states. “But in the 1800s, farmers had cut down many trees and turned forests into farms. Without the trees, there were not as many deer as before. The catamounts started eating sheep that lived on farms. The farmers and hunters killed the panthers to protect their sheep.”
The author is a reporter for the Vermont Daily Chronicle and the Burlington Daily News
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