Tag: mountain lion

Recent News Stories Claim People Have Spotted A Type Of Cat That Doesn’t Exist

It’s easy to mistake house cats for larger wildcats when photos and videos are blurry and lack familiar items to establish a sense of scale. The same phenomenon is responsible for UFO sightings and cryptid creatures like the Loch Ness Monster.

Recently several reports have been making a big deal about blurry videos of black cats, claiming they’re “black mountain lions” or “black panthers” roaming in places like Missouri and Louisiana.

The footage of the first video was shot in Missouri, where pumas once ranged, were extirpated in the 20th century, and have returned in small numbers in recent decades. Like most photos and videos of cryptid or unidentified animals, this one is blurry, taken from a distance, and lacks any object near the animal to provide a sense of scale. The second video is simply a black house cat with her kitten in rural Louisiana.

Our brains are pattern recognition machines and when the information we’re looking for — be it spatial, detail or contextual data — isn’t present, our minds tend to fill in the gaps. That’s the reason why we see faces in clouds, creatures in shadows, men on the moon and the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches. (The technical term for “perception imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus” is “pareidolia,” from the Greek for “instead of” and “image.”)

Compounding the problem is the fact that the word “panther” is one of the most confusing of felid descriptors, a word that vaguely refers to physically large cats but doesn’t refer to any particular species, coat pattern or color.

Photo by adrian vieriu on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Caleb Falkenhagen on Pexels.com
Big cats can be voids too, like this stunning black jaguar in Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Above: A jaguar, a leopard, a puma (mountain lion) and a melanistic jaguar. Although jaguars and leopards look nearly identical, jaguars are stocker with thicker limbs and have blotches inside their rosettes, while leopards do not.

The word panther can refer to a puma, a jaguar or a leopard, but only the latter two species can have melanistic (black) coats.

Contrary to popular belief, even a black cat’s fur is not entirely black — you can still see the rosettes and spots of their coat patterns up close and in certain light conditions.

blackjaguar
This jaguar’s rosettes and spots are visible in direct light. Jaguars in the wild are rarely seen so close or in “perfect” conditions, making it difficult to see coat markings of melanistic members of the species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

However, jaguars don’t range in Missouri, leopards are not native to the Americas, and if someone indeed spotted one of the very rare pumas in Missouri, it could not be black because melanistic pumas do not exist.

Mountain lions (Puma concolor in taxonomic nomenclature) are physically large and are the second-biggest cats by size and weight in the western hemisphere after jaguars, but they are not technically “big cats” because they are not part of the pantherinae subfamily. Pumas cannot roar like big cats, but they’re capable of the classic wildcat “scream,” and they can even meow like small cats.

By process of elimination — and the cat’s physical shape — we can conclude the Missouri video shows a house cat that looks larger because there’s nothing nearby to give us a sense of scale.

Grilled cheese Virgin Mary
This piece of a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on eBay in 2004 because bidders believed the Virgin Mary’s face miraculously appeared on it. Credit: eBay

It may seem unlikely that someone confuses a house cat, which weighs an average of 10 pounds, with a puma, which weighs on average more than 100 pounds, with the largest males pushing 220 pounds.

But it happens all the time even in close encounters, like the incident this summer in which a man riding a dirt bike swore he was ambushed by a puma only for DNA to establish beyond doubt that his attacker was a domestic kitty. For what it’s worth, he still swears it was a mountain lion.

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Like, OMG! This Kitty And Puma Are Totes Besties!

Plus: The awesome and terrifying cats and proto-cats of prehistory!

OMG, you guys! No cap, you gotta totally check out this adorbz video of a sweet widdle kitty witty becoming best fwiends with this mountain lion!

Phoebe the cat sees this cute AF puma near the back door of her home, curiously looking inside. It’s love at first sight as kitty and kitty see each other! Per Parade Pets:

“[T]he kitty in this TikTok video is completely fascinated by the big kitty outside her window. There’s no getting her away from her new friend! 

On Sunday, August 25, @cricketandstrawfl shared this footage of her Tuxedo Cat posted up at the back door in their house, where a cougar was hanging out. It goes without saying that the cougar in question was many times bigger than Phoebe, but that didn’t seem to scare her at all. 

It seemed like the cougar was pretty curious, too. He didn’t appear to be aggressive; instead, he was staring at Phoebe and gently pawing at the glass, trying to figure out who the tiny cat in the window was.”

OMG-hee! Look at the big kitty gently pawing at the door! He wants to give the little kitty a huggy-wuggy!

@cricketandstrawfl

Phoebe making forest friends 🐆 🌲 🐈‍⬛ #wildlife #kitten #cougar #mountainlion #animals #puma #catsoftiktok #cat #catlover #wildanimals #animallover #pnw #westcoast #yyj #vancouverisland #bc #canada #wildlifephotography

♬ Funny – Gold-Tiger

SO ADORBZ! The puma pawing at the door wasn’t testing its strength to see if he could snag a quick meal, those were totes signals of love! Teehee!

Felid predators of pre-history: They will eat you

If you’re in need of a palate cleanser after all that sugar, the BBC’s Discover Wildlife has a rundown of prehistoric cats and their particularly fascinating proto-cat ancestors, some of whom looked more classically cat-like than several species of true cats. Isn’t convergent evolution cool?

There’s the famous smilodon, the saber-toothed cat, xenosmilus, the so-called shark-toothed cat, and homotherium, the scimitar-toothed cat. Outdoing each other with increasingly sword-like teeth was apparently a big thing in the felid world back then.

There’s also the cave lion, the last of the UK’s big cats, and miracinonyx, the American cheetah, but did you know that simbakubwa, the “great lion” of Africa, topped out at almost 3,000 pounds?

Simbakubwa
Simbakubwa was massive, making modern lions look almost like house cats in comparison.
Dinictus
Dinictis looked like a cat, behaved like a cat and hunted like a cat, but was not part of the felidae family. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Simbakubwa and dinictis were examples of “false cats.” That is to say, they were not part of the felid lineage, but closely resembled cats in body plan and behavior through convergent evolution. Nature found a niche, and several different species filled it for a time.

Dinictis in particular looks strikingly like modern big cats, which makes it even more surprising to learn it’s not part of the genetic lineage of the felid line.

Finally — or firstly — there’s proailurus, the first cat or “dawn cat,” from which all true felidae species can trace their lineage. Appearing almost 31 million years ago proailurus enjoyed napping, climbing trees and eating Temptations. Okay, we made that last part up. But still. If proailurus were around today, it would probably go just as crazy for the kitty crack as our house panthers do.

Top image via Youtube.

House Cat Mistaken For A Puma, Plus: The Late Novelist Caleb Carr On His Love For Cats

Caleb Carr credits cats for showing him love during his difficult childhood when he was frequently beaten by his father.

A “mountain lion” spotted near a trail in Ventura County, California, was actually just a house cat, authorities said this week.

California’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife dispatched staff to the area in question, the Los Padres trail in Thousand Oaks, after neighbors there reported what they thought was a baby mountain lion. One family had footage of the interloper captured on a doorbell camera.

The alleged puma turned out to be a house cat, which is a surprisingly common outcome when authorities look into alleged mountain lion sightings. Despite their size, pumas are genetically closer to felines — small and medium-size cats that can purr and meow — than they are to panthera, the genus that includes tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards.

Their gait is almost identical to that of familiar felis catus, their golden coats can look dark at night, and cats can look like pumas — or the other way around — when there’s not enough visual context to gauge the animal’s size, especially in footage captured on cell phones and security cameras, which are almost always equipped with digital zoom instead of the true optical variety.

We know what you’re thinking: this house cat must have been an impressive specimen if it was mistaken for a puma, so there’s a good chance it was Buddy. However, we can confirm that Buddy the Cat definitely was not wandering around California this week.

Novelist found solace in the company of cats

Author Caleb Carr passed away on May 23, and the Los Angeles Times has a nice tribute to him by a reporter who bonded with Carr over their shared love of cats. The writer, 68, had been suffering from cancer for some time.

Carr was known for his crime thrillers (The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness) and military history books, and he spent part of his career teaching military history at Bard College in New York. (Just a short ride from our own alma mater, Marist College.)

Carr’s last book is a tribute to his cat and her species.

Despite his publisher requesting another crime thriller, Carr decided his last book would be about a cat. Specifically his rescue cat Masha, who helped him through difficult times, and the cats of his childhood who comforted him when he was beaten by his father, Beat Generation figure and author Lucien Carr.

“It’s amazing to think about it now, but there were cats, and other animals, that were trying to make me feel better,” Caleb Carr told the Times. “The idea of that was so at odds with everything I was experiencing.”

Carr credits those felines for helping him avoid the abyss, telling the interviewer he “could have been one of those dead-eyed drone troublemakers that comes out of an abusive household very easily, if it hadn’t been for cats.”

Some people were disappointed that Carr didn’t have another novel like The Alienist in him, but Little, Brown publisher Bruce Nichols liked the idea, and the finished book was titled My Beloved Monster: Masha, The Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.

Puma P-22’s Potential Successor Tries Out Hollywood Range

The new puma will have big paw prints to fill if it decides to make its famous predecessor’s range its own. People in Los Angeles are thrilled to have another mountain lion prowling the Hollywood Hills.

When the mountain lion known as P-22 died in late 2022, people in Los Angeles were so distraught they painted murals of him on building facades, buried him after a indigenous tribal funeral and even held a festival in his honor.

The famous feline had already been the subject of books, documentaries and an iconic photograph by National Geographic’s Steve Winter. The image showed P-22 in mid-stride, perfectly centered in a small pool of light beneath the Hollywood sign in the hills of Los Angeles at night. It was a natural symbol of wildlife adapting and surviving.

The love for P-22 wasn’t only based on the incredible fact that a mountain lion had established his “range” in Griffith Park, an oasis of wilderness surrounded by urban landscapes. The puma had to cross Interstate 405 and Route 101, heavy-traffic highways that are famously lethal to his species, to get there. For the next decade he skillfully avoided cars and trucks as he went about his business, popping up on trail cameras or in the backyards of Los Angelinos.

Now there’s a potential successor to the vacant throne.

The new puma isn’t collared and wildlife experts don’t know where it came from, but like P-22 it had to cross several dangerous highways to reach the city.

It’s not clear yet if the mountain lion is male or female. Jeff Sikitch, a biologist with the National Parks Service who is part of an ongoing, decades-long study of pumas, told the Los Angeles Times that he thinks the cat is likely a young male, but there’s not much to go on so far except for witness sightings and a low-resolution video taken by a man who lives in an apartment building near the edge of Griffith Park.

“Will this cat be as skilled as P-22 was at avoiding cars for a decade?” the National Wildlife Federation’s Beth Pratt told the BBC. “We don’t know what’s going to happen here.”

New puma in LA
The only images of the newcomer so far are grainy video stills, but Griffith Park itself has trail cameras that are used to monitor wildlife. Credit: Vladimir Polumiskov

For now, wildlife officials are waiting and watching to see if the potential puma successor puts down roots in P-22’s old hunting grounds or tries to make the dangerous trek out of the city.

If the new puma decides to stay, it will enjoy plentiful deer and a benefit most members of its species do not have — a local population that understands mountain lion attacks are extraordinarily rare, and will support them by giving them a wide berth.

On the other hand, despite the 4,000 acres of Griffith Park and the residential neighborhoods below, the cat’s inherited range would be much smaller than what’s typical for the species. Like humans cramming belongings into apartments, pumas sacrifice space when they live in or around cities.

Suzanne Pye, a local who admired P-22 from afar, said she welcomes the newcomer and isn’t worried about attacks on people. The presence of a mountain lion after almost 18 months without one prowling the hills, she said, will add “a frisson of excitement to the morning hikes.”

P-22_2019
A close-up of P-22 in 2019, when he was briefly captured for a health check-up. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The UK’s Big Cats Are Just Like UFOs, Existing In Blurry Photos And Human Imagination

Blurry photos and fleeting encounters keep the legend of big cats in the UK alive. Could there be leopards, pumas and other large cats roaming the countryside?

For all the advances in optics and camera technology over the last 20 years alone, there are two kinds of people who love blurry, low-resolution footage: UFO enthusiasts and people who are convinced the UK is like a cold, rainy Africa with big cats lurking in every bush and field.

To be a member of either group you’ve got to shut down critical thinking faculties, suspend disbelief and put faith in the highly improbable. (Or the impossible when it comes to people who insist little green men are zipping across the night sky in sleek ships that defy all we know about physics and aerodynamics.)

The UK’s big cat believers claim the country is home to a thriving native population of large felids. Some of them think they’re “panthers,” not specifying which species of cat they think is out there, while others claim jaguars, leopards or tigers are prowling the English countryside, spotted only fleetingly at the edges of fields or in the brush, and only by people who own two-decade-old Nokia flip phones with rudimentary cameras.

They believe a native, breeding population not only exists, but for centuries has eluded capture and avoided leaving compelling evidence.

Cheetah in London
“Pardon me, mate, could you point me toward Aldersgate Street?”

The phantom cats have remarkable stealth abilities. They’ve never tripped a trail camera or appeared in a single frame of CCTV footage. Not a single tree marked for territory, not a single pile of cow bones picked clean by giant barbed tongues, not a single clump of panthera dung. Not even a hungry cub drawn into a village by the smell of barbecue on a summer night.

The reported sightings say more about human capacity for imagination — and how poor we are at estimating size over distance — than they do about the crypto-pumas and melanistic tigers some people swear they’ve seen.

When alleged big cats are spotted in the UK, they’re always seen fleetingly and from afar. When witnesses try to confirm what they’ve seen, the animals are gone.

“I was coming up to Jolly Nice from Oxford at around 7.50pm and the car in front of me was travelling at a steady pace. I looked to the verge of the other side of the road because I saw a bright pair of eyes low down. Upon further inspection, I suddenly realised there was a large outline of a low and stocky cat that was huge.”

That’s the testimony of a UK man who told the Stroud Times, a local newspaper, that he encountered a big cat a few minutes before 8 p.m. on Friday in Nailsworth, a town of about 5,600 people a little more than 100 miles west of London. His description mirrors that of others who say they’ve spotted large felids, mostly in the UK’s countryside and small villages.

Small Cats Looking Big
Photograph from a previous “big cat sighting.” It’s typical of the photos that surface with claims of leopards and pumas stalking the countryside. Blurred details and digital zoom make it difficult to gauge distance and scale.

The story’s headline reads: “Big cat expert’s verdict: beast spotted was a leopard.”

The expert in question is Rick Minter, an amateur biologist who has made UK big cat legends into something of a cottage industry by publishing books, hosting a podcast and frequently speaking to newspapers about the phenomenon. It’s not clear how Minter decided the animal in Friday’s sighting was a “black leopard,” but he’s said in previous interviews that he believes most alleged big cat sightings in the UK are leopards, with pumas accounting for most of the others.

Neither animal is native to Europe. Pumas range from South America to the American northwest and midwest, with isolated populations in places like Florida. Leopards are native to Africa and Asia, with ranges that overlap with lions on the former continent and tigers on the latter, mostly in India.

Puma at Buckingham Palace
“I’m originally from San Diego, actually, but the expat life suits me and the British are very tasty.”

Some have floated the possibility that the mysterious felids are escaped pets who have successfully adjusted to the countryside. Minter says the evidence points to breeding populations.

If there are thriving populations, the cats would need to exist in numbers, with at least 50 on the extreme low end. If they’re escaped pets, the authorities would know.

Unlike the US, where big cat ownership was banned in the vast majority of states even before the recent Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed, owning a massive carnivore slash killing machine isn’t illegal in the UK. But owners have to register their animals, seek approval for the habitats and enclosures they’ve built, and submit to annual inspection.

There have been a handful of escapes over the decades and each time the authorities were able to capture or kill the animals, often tracking them via livestock kills. Pet tigers and leopards might be dangerous, but they’re still at a disadvantage compared to their wild brethren, meaning they go for the easy, guaranteed kills when they’re hungry. Nothing’s easier than a docile farm animal that’s never seen a big cat.

Tiger at a pub
“Oi, wanna have a pint and watch Man U vs Arsenal on the telly?”

More recently, big cat hunters in the UK have tried to find more compelling evidence than a couple of blurry photographs of house cats out for a stroll. They’ve touted suspicious-looking pug marks, and in August 2022 found black fur on a barbed wire fence. According to the believers, a UK lab confirmed the fur belonged to a leopard, but there was no chain of custody, no documentation of how the sample was found and handled. Big cat experts remain skeptical.

Indeed, Oxford’s Egil Droge, a wildlife conservationist, points out that in places where big cats live, you don’t have to go hunting for evidence. It’s everywhere.

“I’ve worked with large carnivores in Africa since 2007 and it’s obvious if big cats are around. You would regularly come across prints of their paws along roads. The rasping sound of a leopard’s roar can be heard from several kilometres,” Droge wrote, noting that leopards in particular are not discriminating about what they kill and leave ample evidence of their handiwork when they’ve hunted.

Still, as improbable as the sightings are, the big cat enthusiasts of the UK have one up on UFO enthusiasts and hunters of cryptics like Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and the Jersey Devil: the creatures they’re looking for actually exist and may surprise us yet.