Vermonters Say They Saw a Mountain Lion – Again
April 6, 2006
Just when most of us have forgotten about the numerous reports over the past few years of mountain lion sightings, along comes another. Only about 9 miles out of Rutland, in Pittsford on the Common Hill Road, travelers had lined up beside the road to watch an animal roaming about freely in an adjacent field.
One woman who lives nearby said that when she lived in Montana, she saw mountain lions there and she knows what she saw in the field was a mountain lion. Others who witnessed it said it was a big cat of some kind. There were perhaps as many as 6 witnesses.
A woman also pulled out her binoculars and watched the animal about 250 feet away. Another man took photographs.
What viewers described as odd, although most observers said they didn’t know the normal behavior of a mountain lion, was the animal didn’t seem shy or intimdated by the people watching. At one point the animal looked over at the people and began to approach them, then turned and headed into the forest.
Local game officials are saying that this is another one of those sightings where people claim to have seen a mountain lion. Tom Stearns, a Vermont Game Warden says they get reports all the time. He didn’t want to dispute what people are saying they saw, he simply says they need proof to substantiate it.
He says that if mountain lions do exist in Vermont, sooner or later they will find real evidence, like a carcass from a vehicle-lion accident, or good photographs, tracks, scat or anything verifiable. With all the reported sightings of these mammoth cats over the years, none of these revealing things have been produced. He says he will not argue with people in what they saw. He’ll just wait for the proof.
Tom Remington
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Mountain Lions are very scary, thank god I have never encountered one.
Yeah now that I think about it I really don’t think that mountain lions are in vermont…
The Eastern Puma! This is like Big Foot. Here I am again with some more stuff from another Eastern State with Lion sightings.
http://www.westernhunter.com/Pages/Vol06Issue05/palions.html
I have seen, definitively, a mountain lion in the woods in Wyndham, VT. My family owns a chalet up there which I have been vacationing at all my life. A couple years ago, I was woken up by a loud scratching noise around 6:30 AM. I went outside, looked at the back of the chalet, and saw an orange-yellow colored animal slouched low to the ground (like a cat hunting) and about 8 feet long from nose to end of tail. I instantly recognized it as a mountain lion. The funny thing is that I had always thought mountain lions were native to Vermont, but I have read many posts stating otherwise. It appears that the cat was using the roof, which, being an A-frame, comes very close to the ground on both sides, as a scratching post.
In order to discount any disbelievers, I am an avid outdoorsman, animal lover, and skeptic of many facets. I usually look for hard evidence as proof. Although I do not have any pictures/video, I am confident in my analysis of my sighting.
Re: Vermont Mountain Lion — In the early 1970s my wife and I were driving up the then dirt road from her family’s camp on the Milton Shore in Vermont. It was about noon on a summer’s day when we rounded a corner and drove towards ‘The Everest Farm’. Like many farms in Vermont, the house was on one side of the road and the farm buildings on the other. As we approached the farm I saw a huge tawny tan colored cat moving up fast beside the farm building to the right, cross the road at full stretch not twenty feet in front of the car and bound at speed past the house and up over the slope beyond. It was a truly magnificent creature of sinewy grace and strength, some seven feet or more at full stretch before us. Having immigrated from the UK only a few years before and not knowing any better, I simply assumed the animal to be the famed if elusive Vermont catamount, celebrated in Milton for instance by the Catamount Stadium speedway. It was not until a couple of years ago that a TV news item here in British Columbia prompted me to recall the incident so many years ago. The local news was of a BC cougar that had got into a cottage. The scene was being filmed as forest rangers went in the front door: suddenly the beautiful sinewy cougar leaped through a screened window at full stretch, right in front of the camera, to really hit the ground running and disappear promptly back into the trees. There is absolutely no doubt that this was first cousin to the magnificent cat we saw in Vermont over thirty-five years ago. A little light research on the net tells me the Vermont catamount became extinct in the early 20th century. Our sighting was about two miles north of the Rte 2 causeway to Grand Isle and across to Rouses Point in New York State. It is possible that the cat we saw, I think a young male, was a visitor from the neighboring state. Whatever it was, it was way way too large to be a feral cat or a bob cat, and anyway, regarding the latter, its tail was full length — Fred Kirk, Vancouver BC
Last weekend August 22, 2009 at around 10:45 am driving to our camp in the northeast kingdom, I was traveling on rout 111 east about three miles past Salmon Lake in Derby and near Morgan when I spotted a little fawn just ten feet from the road. As I glanced around I noticed movement of a light colored animal about eighty yards out in the field from the fawn which at the time I assumed it to be another deer, probably the mother doe. As I kept driving by I realized this was in fact no deer but a large like cat on a slow prance. The main thing that caught my attention as I drove by, was the light brown, more of a tan color body that was very long and sleek with a boxy shape head and short muzzle that was even lighter in color than the body. My curiousity made me turn around to get another look while all the time I was telling myself that I beleived it was a large cat and definately no deer, for I am an experienced deer hunter of 45 years. When I arrived at the location, another car was already there pulled off to the side. As soon as I stopped behind the car a women pulled out with extreme excitment and said that she identified the cat as a very large catamount and asked if we had them in this area. Right then and there this women confirmed my curiosity and what I had thought it to be. She witnessed the cat stalking the fawn which apparently took off after it in hopes of cutting it off. I dare say that poor fawn is probably not around anymore. Boy was that a large cat!! I figure it was 6-7 feet long and well over 100 and maybe closer to a 200 pound cat. It had to be a full size cougar.
Cool experience. Too bad you hadn’t gotten a picture. But do us all a favor and make sure you officially tell everyone there are no mountain lions in Vermont or anywhere in New England for that matter.
Great news!
we live in dorset vermont during the summer and this morning my husband walked out our front door and saw a young mountain lion standing about 15 feet away. it went about 100 feet in about 4 jumps and sat on the hilly edge of the woods next to our driveway and watched him for a minute before walking into the woods. last year we saw 3 baby mountain lions cross the road in front of us one night on our way home from a different part of dorset.