After a frustrating early morning of turkey
hunting in late April, John and his father-in-law gave up and
decided to return to their Jacksonville homes. They wouldn’t
go home without a good story, though.
As the two men stepped out of the woods, John
spotted something, crouched low in the still-untilled field.
“Whoa, stop!” he shouted —
and as his father-in-law turned around to see what had startled
John, a big cat bolted into the woods, “covering 30 feet in
just two or three bounds.”
“It couldn’t have been more
than 25 feet in front of him, but he didn’t seem to see
it,” John says. “It was huge — I would guess 6 to
7 feet long.”
Chalk up another sighting of a big cat in
central Illinois. Like most of the others, it’s unconfirmed
and uncorroborated.
The only “big” cats officially
recognized as wild residents of Illinois are bobcats — and
they aren’t all that big. They are, by all statistical
measures, making an amazing population recovery in certain parts of
the state, but it would be hard to mistake a bobcat for large cat.
“I have seen bobcats before while
hunting,” John says. “This was certainly not a bobcat.
This looked like a dark-colored cougar.”
A similar animal was seen about three years
earlier near Murrayville, south of Jacksonville. The woman (like
John, she doesn’t want her name published) says that the cat
she spotted near her rural home was as large as a
“retriever-type dog.”
Newer, more substantive evidence has piqued
the interest of officials with the Illinois Department of Natural
Resources.
Joe Redshaw, an insurance agent from
Rushville, recently turned over to the state agency videotape
evidence of a large cat he had seen prowling near his property six
times in the last two weeks.
The animal on the 15-second tape —
possessing the distinctive long tail and raised front shoulders of
a cougar — is shown crossing in front of a barn, in a
pasture, and even in front of a cow.
It is “definitely a big cat,” a
state biologist says. What’s unclear is whether the cat has
markings. Though they are not evident on the video, Redshaw notes
that an earlier, closer encounter left him with that impression,
suggesting that the animal is an escaped exotic — for
example, a leopard or jaguarondi — instead of a cougar, which
roamed Illinois up until about 120 years ago.
Gerald Day was living near
Walkerville in the late spring of 2003 when his opinion on cougars
in Illinois was cemented into a “without a doubt
certain” position.
“I was looking out a window at a field
when, out of some bordering timber, stepped a cougar,” Day
says. “It was yellow or tan and was some 200 feet away. It
had a really long tail and was about the same size as a lab dog,
but this was definitely a cat. My family was in the house, so I
called to them and got multiple witnesses, but unfortunately we did
not have a camera ready before it went back in the
timber.”
The cougar (often commonly known by such
alternative names as puma, mountain lion, and panther) is
classified by the Illinois Natural History Survey as an extirpated
species. It is commonly believed that the last free-roaming cougars
in Illinois were shot and killed in the 1880s. Most government wildlife
agencies maintain that, outside of the subspecies known as the Florida
panther, no active cougar (Felis concolor
cougar) populations exist east of the
Mississippi River.
Authorities are quick to admit, however, that
cougars are being kept by individuals, both legally and illegally,
as pets in Illinois. Though the state’s laws preventing the
importation and keeping of big cats were strengthened in the 1980s,
a black market for exotic animals has always thrived. It is to the
possibility of intentional or inadvertent escapees from this stock
of caged cats that state officials and academics have always
attributed cougar sightings in Illinois — until, that is,
July 15, 2000.
Five years ago, in Randolph County, a
collision between a tawny cougar and a train gave scientists their
first Illinois carcass to study. The specimen was a healthy male
with DNA matching that of the wild populations of the Western
states. The Illinois State Academy of Science proclaimed it the
first documented wild cougar found in Illinois since the late 19th
century.
Four years later, a hunter in Mercer County,
near New Boston, stumbled across another dead cougar; this one had
succumbed to a wound apparently caused by an arrow. The body was
turned over to Dr. Clay Nielson of Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale, who specializes in the study of big cats. This
specimen, too, was a large (84 inches, head to tail) male. Its
stomach contained both the wild game it had hunted and grasses
— a common finding in wild bobcats. A DNA analysis of the
cat’s tissues has not yet been released.
When asked about cougars in Illinois, Bob
Bluett, a certified wildlife biologist with the DNR, says that it
“seemed likely” that the Mercer County cat was indeed
of wild stock and that the two males “fit the profile of
pioneering individuals.”
Most male cougars are known as transients;
lacking a distinct territory, they may travel as far as 30 miles in
one night. These transient males may set up territories of 20 to 40
square miles and eventually seek out multiple transient females,
which then remain within the territory. The monogamous females
generally produce one to six offspring every two years.
But have cougars really returned to Illinois?
Is central Illinois host to a permanent, albeit small, resident
breeding population?
If there are cougars in Illinois,
perhaps no one has had a better chance of coming across one in his
career than Dennis Langellier. A former state employee, Langellier
drove each day from Jerseyville to Mount Sterling, a path that runs
parallel to the heavily wooded bluffs of the Illinois River.
Langellier’s first sighting occurred on a subzero
January morning in 1994 as he was heading north, just south of
Exeter. Two full-size cougars, he says, crossed the road a
quarter-mile in front of him. As his car neared where they had
crossed, he saw them, roughly 25 feet from the highway.
“I would guess that each was 200 pounds
in weight. They were tan-colored, and both had long tails,”
he says. “From what I know about them, they are solitary
creatures. The only time more than one are seen together is a
mother with her young. Though they were both large, full-grown, I
can only assume that that is what I saw.”
Langellier’s second sighting occurred six
years later, during the summer of 2000, not far from the first. It was
on Route 100, not more than a half-mile south of Interstate 72. This
time, a tawny-yellow big cat crossed 50 yards in front of his car.
“This cat wasn’t either of the
ones I had seen before. This one was not as big — it was
still big, just not full-grown. Still a cougar, though, no
doubt,” he says.
“My oddest sighting, though, was fairly
recent. I live in rural Patterson, along some woods and a creek.
This was a couple winters ago. I was outside working when I see
this big cat — all black — come out of the creek bed
and jump over my fence and head back into the woods. This
didn’t look like a cougar to me, but it was no housecat. It
was at least three times as big as a housecat and had a really
muscular rear end and a long tail like a cougar. I don’t know
what it was, but I saw it,” he says.
Like Langellier, Vic Lanzotti logs more miles
on west-central Illinois’ back roads than most of us could
imagine, working as a FedEx driver for the counties of Morgan,
Scott, Greene, and Macoupin. Like Langellier, he came across a
cougar — two years ago, in mid-July — and enjoys
sharing other stories he has been told because of his sighting.
“[It was] in Greene County, east of
White Hall, in the Apple Creek Bottom. The cat crossed the road in
front of me and jumped the ditch into corn about 5 or 6 feet
tall,” Lanzotti says.
“I was reluctant to tell anyone, but I
had some friends I trusted, and, as it turns out, a few had also
seen big cats. A lady in White Hall had seen a black cat —
cougar-size — cross the road south of Greenfield on [Illinois
Route] 108. Another farmer, from Carrollton, saw a large black-cat
cougar in about the same area. There is a farmer in Eldred that
says a mother and cub wintered in a hollow on his place close to
Spanky on the Macoupin Creek.”
Dave Holterfield of Beardstown
doesn’t believe cougars have returned to Illinois; instead,
he insists they never left.
Holterfield was born and raised, he says,
“in the hollers and hills of Calhoun County,” a region
renowned for and often proud of being behind the times. It was 1958
when Holterfield’s father spotted a full-grown cougar on the
family farm. His father had stopped a team of horses and was a
rolling a cigarette when the cat emerged from dense woods.
Less than a year after this incident, young Holterfield
came face to face with the cat: “The sun wasn’t up yet,
but there was plenty of morning light to see by. I was headed out
to the privy and had just stepped out of the house when there it
was, just sitting there on its haunches. It was huge, tawny, and
just staring at me,” Holterfield says. “I ran back
inside and woke my dad, shouting, ‘That cat is out there
again!’ ” By the time his father got out there, though,
the cat was gone.
Years later, Holterfield found half of a
pig’s carcass on the property. “It was not torn apart
like coyotes would do; it was cleanly cut in half,”
Holterfield says.
And in 1972, he says, while on a trip to
visit his new in-laws, driving from Mozier to Kampsville, he
spotted a pair of juvenile tawny cougars lounging 20 feet from the
road. “They were not bobcats or big housecats,” he
says. “You could see it in their haunches, head, and tail.
These were cougars — no doubt about it.”
Not long after, Holterfield moved to the
Beardstown area, and he hasn’t seen a cougar since.
Homer Briney is a down-to-earth, successful
farmer who owns a large plot of land on the Illinois River bluffs
just north of Beardstown. He happens to live near Joe Redshaw, the
man with the recent videotaped evidence of a big cat.
In late spring, after a heavy rain, Briney
discovered a trail of mud prints across his blacktopped driveway,
footprints that lasted for weeks because of the recent drought
conditions. Each print measured just over 4 inches wide and 3.5
inches long, and Briney is convinced they were left by a large
cougar. Admittedly, cougar prints and dog prints are quite similar
— the primary difference lies in the rear lobes of the ball
of the print, which, unfortunately, were poorly distinguishable in
the muddy imprints.
“I believe there is a cougar living in
the bottoms near my farm,” Briney says. “We have the
perfect environment for one out here. Two winters ago, a friend of
mine was hunting on my property and shot a huge buck. It was so big
that he had problems moving it, so he called me. It had started to
rain, so I told him, ‘Let’s get it in the
morning.’ Well, the next morning we go to right where he knew
it was, and it is gone! We searched everywhere and eventually found
it some 500 feet away. All that was left was the skin, the end of
the legs, and most of the head. It wasn’t ripped apart like
coyotes would do. This was different. That was a 300-pound buck
dragged that far.”
He claims that the same thing happened this
last winter to a deer that was hit on the road in front of his
house. He found the remains, in similar condition, dragged into a
field near his home.
“The night that these prints were made,
my dog acted really strange, standing at the back door being
protective, but at the same time you could tell that it was scared
to death,” Briney says.
Between the Illinois State Police
reports and the carcasses that have been found, two facts are
inarguable: Attracted by our large deer population, transient male
cougars do occasionally roam into Illinois from the Western states;
and cougars are certainly kept secretly and illegally in
“home zoos.” Of course, anyone who came face to face
with a cougar in the wild would probably find the question of the
animal’s ancestry an irrelevant question.
Officially, the answer to the question of
whether cougars are really back — having established a
resident breeding population in Illinois — is still unknown.
The search for them has begun to resemble a Midwestern version of
the hunt for Bigfoot.
Maurice Hornocker, director of the Hornocker
Wildlife Institute at the University of Idaho and the first
researcher to use radio telemetry in field studies of cougar
movements and travels, recently said, “[Cougars] will hit the
Mississippi in the next decade. The Midwest is beautiful cat
country, full of deer and cover.”
Ask some folks in rural central Illinois, and
they will tell you that Hornocker’s projection is behind by
at least a decade or so.
To see the cougar video click
here.
Unable to view the video? Download Quicktime now!
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2005.
