Beast of Never, Cat of God: the Search for the Eastern Puma

Beast of Never, Cat of God: The Search for the Eastern Puma by Bob Butz The Lyons Press, 2005; $22.95

There are wild things among us. Who would have thought, just a few decades ago, that suburbanites would come to view the white-tailed deer as a major nuisance to their lawns and gardens? Who would have imagined that peregrine falcons would nest in city high-rises and terrorize squirrels in city parks? The heightened environmental sensitivity of the past century, along with a drastic reduction in the number of rifle-toting frontiersmen, has rescued a host of creatures from the brink of extinction in the eastern United States.

So why not the mountain lion (Puma concolor)? Known by many names--puma, cougar, catamount, panther--this large feline predator was once wide-spread throughout much of North America. A full-grown cougar can weigh more than 150 pounds and can measure seven feet from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail. It stalks everything from rabbits to elk, but its preference is deer--nowadays in plentiful supply. Estimates of the present-day cougar population in North America range between 30,000 and 50,000, but most experts think virtually all of them inhabit the western mountain or Pacific Coast states. A vestigial population of a hundred or so live deep in the Florida Everglades. But except for the Florida felines, as far as one can tell, wild cougars no longer live east of the Mississippi.

At least that's the official version. Bob Butz, a nature writer who lives near Traverse City, Michigan, at the far northern edge of the lower peninsula, has a different story. Butz has spent the past few years among a strange subculture of hunters and outdoorsmen who truly believe, contrary to the stance of state and federal wildlife managers, that cougars have begun to recolonize the East. Butz's principal informant is Patrick Rusz, who has both a Ph.D. in wildlife ecology and a bee in his bonnet about the big cats. Rusz seems to spend most of his weekends in the woods, following up reports of sightings and collecting piles of suspicious scat, which he stores in an ice chest in the back of his pickup to save for DNA analysis.

By immersing himself in the cat-chasers' culture, Butz has put together plenty of evidence pointing to the presence of wild pumas in the eastern woods. Many candid snapshots of purported cougars are no clearer than fuzzy pictures of Bigfoot, but some are sharp and unambiguous. A lot of the tracks seem genuine, and laboratory tests of scat samples often come back positive for puma.

But caution is in order. Wildlife officials seem willing to grant the occasional sighting, but they are reluctant to conclude that such pumas represent a native wild population, as many of the "cat people" believe. One or two strays may have wandered east; an occasional pet puma may have escaped from a zoo or a private preserve. That's a bit different from claiming that dozens of pumas are breeding in the woods.

In the absence of incontrovertible evidence (there's been a notable lack of pumas shot during hunting season), game wardens seem inclined to regard the cougar issue as something of a nuisance. With plenty of well-documented species that need conserving, the official position is that the cougar lobbyists should "get a life." After reading Butz's reportage, I tend to agree. But, recalling the occasional sightings of pumas my local newspaper has reported, I'm going to keep a sharper eye out for the big cats the next time I'm out on the trail.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He is the 2005 winner of the Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society.

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