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Welcome back, mountain lion: Is

the Northeast ready for predators?

Tracks in Winchester may have been a false alarm, but expertssay big animals are coming

By  Keith  O’Brien | GL OBE COR R ESP ONDENT AP R IL 1 1 , 20 1 4

THE HEADLINES WERE SHOCKING enough torattle even the most hardened suburbanite: Amountain lion, it seemed, was lurking inWinchester. Police in the quiet community northof Boston were convinced of it—convincedenough to warn residents with a reverse 911 call.And just like that, across town, a new fear wasborn. Mothers and dog-walkers began scanningthe horizon for a predator.

“Cougars everywhere. Everybody’s seeing them.Aliens. Bigfoot. Just the whole thing,” said TomFrench, the assistant director of the stateDivision of Fisheries and Wildlife, which hasbeen forced to address the concerns. “In thiscase, though, there’s a portion of it that’s reality.”

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French doesn’t believe a mountain lion, also known as a cougar, is stalking Winchester.The evidence, he said, leaves “absolutely no uncertainty” that the mysterious animalleaving tracks in the snow recently is either a coyote or a dog. But the possibility is notthe stuff of myth: Mountain lions and wolves—large predators—are indeed starting to

THE BOSTON GLOBE

At  least  one  gray  wolf  was  reported

stalking  sheep  in  Massachusetts.

make inroads into New England. “They really are here sometimes,” French said. Andexperts believe that within a decade or two the animals, which disappeared fromMassachusetts more than 150 years ago, could be back in much larger numbers.

“The eastern border of the range of mountainlions is moving progressively more and moreeast, and it’s only a matter of time until itreaches all the way to the East Coast,” said NoahCharney, a wildlife ecologist and animal trackingexpert who has worked with the state NaturalHeritage and Endangered Species program forthe past seven years. “I sort of suspect that all ofa sudden one day we’re going to know there aremountain lions here. There’s going to be noquestion. And it might happen really fast. Itmight be a family moves in, they start breeding,and within a few years, there’s a whole lot of them.”

Learning to coexist once again with long-vanished wildlife isn’t a new issue in NewEngland. In recent years, Massachusetts has seen an explosion in the populations ofbeavers, turkeys, deer, and bears, creating a host of problems: beaver dams floodingneighborhoods, turkeys chasing pedestrians, deer scampering across highways in thenight. But the return of mountain lions—animals known to kill pets, livestock, and, onrare occasions, even humans—is something altogether different, an event that wouldsurely change the way we walk through the woods and play in our yards, if nothing else.

State wildlife officials say they have policies in place in handle this eventuality. Butculturally, given the recent uproar in Winchester, it’s clear we’re not entirely preparedto live once again with predators, ones our ancestors wanted to kill so badly they paidpeople to haul in their carcasses and cheered when they died out altogether. “Are wegoing to be happy about having brought them back? I don’t know,” Charney admitted.“It’s easy to love nature when it’s not scary or dangerous.”

***

IN  THE  BEGINNING, early settlers in New England faced plenty of dangers. No onecan say for sure just how many mountain lions or wolves were prowling the forests atthe time. But they were here, said Marion Larson, the chief of information and

A  mountain  lion  visited  the  QuabbinReservoir  area  in  the  late  1990s.

education for the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Colonists didn’t like them. And

she can pinpoint exactly when they were killed off in Massachusetts.

The wolf was a problem as early as 1630, when, according to historical records, officials

started paying people to kill them. By 1750, wolves had been eradicated from eastern

Massachusetts. And less than 60 years later, the state was down to just two—a pair of

lone wolves, records say, ranging from Amherst to Montague, until, inevitably, they too

were killed in 1805.

The eastern cougar, as the mountain lion native to New England was known, hung

around a bit longer, but ultimately met the same fate. The last one was gunned down in

Massachusetts in 1858—a detail important enough at the time to be logged in town

reports. “In many cases there were bounties on those animals. And the bounties were

paid by the town,” Larson said. “They were considered a major predator on livestock.”

Farmers presumably welcomed the news, but mountain lions were doomed in the East

for lots of reasons at the time. Forests had been cut down and plowed into farms, deer

populations killed off. There was less habitat and fewer prey animals. According to

research published by two Massachusetts biologists, the eastern cougar basically

ceased to exist anywhere in the East by 1906. The animal, they wrote, was “a vanishing

species,” as were turkeys, beavers, and bears—an idea that at least one prominent

Massachusetts resident mourned in the 19th century. (From a scientific perspective,

it’s unclear whether the eastern cougar was actually distinct from the western one;

most biologists now believe all the North American cougars were of one species.)

“Henry Thoreau describes the muskrat as the

largest wild animal in central and eastern

Massachusetts,” said David Foster, director of

the Harvard Forest, the university’s center for

forestry research. “It was a beautiful agricultural

landscape with scattered woodlands. But it didn’t

have any of the large mammals. So the

expectation in the 19th century would have been

that agriculture would just keep growing, that

human domination across the whole landscape

would increase, and that forests would get smaller.”

Instead, in Massachusetts, the opposite has happened. As farmers moved west—or just

gave up—trees returned. According to Harvard Forest, roughly 80 percent of the state

is woodland today, compared to about 40 percent in the mid-1800s. With the trees—

oak and birch, pine and hemlock—have come the animals again, sometimes with the

helpful nudge of biologists, sometimes on their own. In the last century alone, the

population of deer across Massachusetts has increased 18-fold, to roughly 90,000,

stocking the woods with plenty of prey. As Larson put it, the table in Massachusetts is

set. “There’s an abundance of prey here,” she said. “Mountain lions could prey on a

whole bunch of critters here—in quantity.”

In the Midwest, it’s already happening. Populations of mountain lions are growing and

creeping ever eastward—into Nebraska, Missouri, and Wisconsin, a state that until

recently hadn’t recorded cougars in more than a century. “They’re only rarely getting

this far,” French said.

Still, occasional cougars from points west are beginning to visit the area. State officials

confirmed the presence of a mountain lion near the Quabbin Reservoir in the late

1990s. More recently, in 2011, a mountain lion roamed Connecticut before being hit

and killed by a car. This was no exotic pet: Genetic testing showed the 140-pound cat

had traveled 1,500 miles from South Dakota. And on at least one other occasion in

recent years, there were reports of a different predator stalking sheep in Western

Massachusetts. “Lo and behold, this wasn’t a 50-pound coyote,” French said. It was an

85-pound gray wolf, proving, yes, our habitat was back, all right.

“If there were mountain lions here, they’d probably do fine,” Charney said. “So now all

we’re doing is just waiting for them to show up.”

***

WHILE  WE  WAIT, officials have come up with a plan. Since the mid-1990s,

Massachusetts has employed a Large Animal Response Team—a collection of state

wildlife biologists and Environmental Police officers trained to deal with bears, moose,

and other creatures. If a mountain lion posed a threat, the team could be called upon to

handle it. But short of that, a large cat would be safeguarded under state statute—a

welcome visitor, like any other indigenous animal. “It would be exciting as heck if

there were wild mountain lions,” Larson said. “It would be exciting, and they would be

afforded protection.”

JIM COLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE

An  18-­fold  rise  in  the  deer  populationhas  “set  the  table”  for  predators.

Not everyone would be so thrilled. Out west, people have blamed the resurgent cougarfor killing livestock or wiping out deer. To control the population, states haveauthorized cougar hunts. Some scientists have argued that the hunts have onlydestabilized the population, flooding areas with young males who are more likely tostir up trouble. And then there’s the problem of what Foster called “humanexpectations, human reactions.”

It’s hard enough for some residents to get alongwith the animals that are already here, especiallywhen those animals move into suburbia. Lastyear, for example, officials had to confront a bearthat had wandered into a neighborhood ofNewton near the commuter train tracks and theMassachusetts Turnpike; eventually, for the sakeof public safety, they decided it had to be killed.Substitute a mountain lion—a predator thatmight attack the family dog or stalk a child—andthings could get even dicier. “Many of them willbe shot in the process,” Foster predicted. “We could tolerate them,” he added. “I don’tthink we will tolerate them.”

One solution, French suggested, is education. Wildlife officials routinely give talksacross the state, teaching people how to live with the animals in their neighborhoods.Maybe it’s time, French said, to develop a talk on mountain lions—even if they aren’tyet here.

But he admits that talks alone aren’t likely to put people at ease. The potential returnof mountain lions comes at time when many people live in a way that’s largelydisconnected from nature. Those who do enjoy the outdoors venture into the NewEngland woods knowing they are mostly safe on their hikes. For many decades now,there have been few creatures out there with any potential to threaten us, aside fromdeer ticks, perhaps, and bees.

Charney counts himself among those lovers of the outdoors. He lives in Sunderland,Mass., and enjoys taking walks in the forest at night. He says he’d still do it if mountainlions were here.

© 2014 BOSTON GLOBE MEDIA PARTNERS, LLC

In the beginning, though, he admits he’d be nervous—of the unknown. What might the

mountain lions do? How will we react? What if something tragic happens because we

are unprepared? “That could be a bad way,” Charney said, “to start off the decade of

mountain lions.”

Freelance  writer  Keith  O’Brien  is  a  former  staff  writer  for  the  Globe  and  the  author  of

the  book  “Outside  Shot,”  chronicling  one  town’s  lonely  quest  for  basketball  greatness.

E-­mail  him  at  kob.story@gmail.com.

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