photos courtesy of eastern cougar foundation

does

BIG
the
cougar
still
live cat
here?
By John
mystery
Fulmer

Morris,
Pennsylvania, a
blip on the map
in southern
Tioga County,
is well known
regionally for
its rattlesnake
roundup. What
most people
don’t know is
that Morris has
its own CSI unit.
As in, Cougar
Sighting
Investigation.

Page 8 MOUNTAIN HOME NOVEMBER 2007

 The Foundation

photo by john fulmer

Morris resident Kerry Geykis, a forester and
former Tioga County planner, is part of the
Eastern Cougar Foundation, a nonprofit based
in Harman, West Virginia. Geykis donates a
great deal of his time sleuthing into the hun-
dreds of reported cougar sightings east of the
Mississippi River.
He is especially interested in Pennsylvania
sightings, and though his true believers insist the
cougar lives in the commonwealth’s mountains
and forests, Geykis and the ECF have yet to
verify the big cat’s existence here. His interest
was piqued after spending years working in the
woods and as a hunter and trapper. He’d never
seen a mountain lion but kept hearing reports all
of the time.
“People were adamant and they weren’t lying
to me,” Geykis said. “I mean, most of them
weren’t lying—we’ve caught a couple liars—but,
in the East, most of them really thought they
had seen a cougar. And I thought, ‘Well, they
can’t all be wrong.’ In fact, I figured quite a few
of them had to be right.
“So, for a period of time in my life, I was re-
ally looking for cougars,” Geykis said. “I would
sit in a tree somewhere and try to lure them in. Kerry Geykis, above, poses with his dog, Turq. Geykis, of
And I got deer, weasels, dogs, coyotes. Never a Morris, Pennsylvania, volunteers with the Eastern Cougar
Foundation, a network of mountain-lion researchers. Right:
cougar. But all those years, I kept looking until I “KY Kitten” was killed by a truck in Kentucky near the
finally said, ‘Hey, I need some help here. There’s border of Virginia and West Virginia, and it provides some
something wrong here. I’m in the woods more of the best evidence that cougars may be reproducing in the
than all of these other people put together and I wild in the eastern United States.
haven’t seen a cougar.’”
sibling, because the kitten was too young to be
alone. The driver took the body to the Kentucky
Eastward Ho? Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources,
where it was frozen and later analyzed.
Like most of those who claim to have seen a The kitten lacked most captive-cat signifiers.
cougar, Geykis fervently wants to believe this “in- She had not been declawed nor had she been
dicator species” and “apex predator” has returned tattooed, which is often the case for pet cougars.
to the Twin Tiers. The few cougars found recently She was not wearing a tag or collar. However, the
in the Eastern woods have either been released or site says, “DNA analysis indicated that the kitten’s
have escaped from private zoos, which are legal maternal ancestry included genes from South
in some states if the animals have proper permits. America, pointing to the pet trade . . . but pater-
John C. Gallant shot a wild cougar in 1967 while nal ancestry was shown to be North American.
squirrel hunting in Crawford County, Pennsylva- “This kitten is important for several reasons: she as the name indicates, is a hunter at the head of
nia, but its characteristics matched those of Costa was a highway fatality, and biologists claim that if the food chain, and the eastern cougar’s extirpa-
Rican cougars. South American cats have come cougars were present in any numbers some would tion (a fancy word for “wiped out”) was the re-
to be an important source of “pets” for folks with get hit by cars; she indicates that reproduction is sult of several factors related to its high ranking.
private menageries. going on in the wild; and she exemplifies the mix- It is the largest cat in North America (fourth-
There is some evidence, however, that wild ing of cougars from various origins that is prob- largest in the world) and had the greatest
cougars may be reproducing in the East. On the ably occurring in the Eastern woods.” distribution of any mammal in the continent
ECF Web site under the heading “KY Kitten,” it until man usurped its top spot. But when the
says in June 1997 a pickup truck hit an eight- Colonists arrived in the New World, the cougar
pound female cougar kitten on Highway 850 Cougar History was a mystery. According to the ECF Web site,
in western Floyd County, Kentucky, which is the Colonists “were familiar with wolves but had
in Appalachia near the borders of Virginia and An indicator species helps define an environ- no knowledge of cougars, because cougars live
West Virginia. The driver also noticed a larger ment’s characteristics; its presence means a more
and a smaller shape, probably the mother and a natural ecosystem is in place. An apex predator, Please See Cougar on page 10

NOVEMBER 2007 MOUNTAIN HOME Page 9

Cougar continued from page 9
only in the New World. Nonetheless, cougars
were quickly viewed with the ancient prejudice
that Europeans had against all predators. At
first, settlers thought cougars were African lions
or leopards (the black phase of which is called
panther).”
Thus the cougar’s decline was caused in large
part by man’s natural fear of large predators,
justifiable since he can become their prey but
overblown given the rarity of attacks. Second,
ungulates are the cougar’s main food source, but
if deer, elk, and moose aren’t handy, mountain
lions quickly turn to livestock and can just as
quickly run afoul of farmers armed with rifles.
Third, only nobles were allowed to hunt in Eu-
rope and, stalking deer in Penn’s Woods was lib-
erating for the common man. Attendant to that
is the simple fact that venison and other game
were vital to the settlers’ survival as they pushed
westward. Cougars were seen as competitors.
The eastern cougar’s demise was speeded up
by habitat loss. More people, more farms, more
lumbering meant less cover for an animal that
needs to carve out a good deal of territory to
hunt. And it is a solitary hunter that won’t share
its property. It’s conditional, of course, and esti-
mates vary, but a cougar’s range could be more
than 500 square miles, a boundary the male
cougar marks by scraping together piles of leaves
and grasses and urinating on them. As coloniza-
tion spread and timber harvesting and commer-
cial deer hunting increased, man and mountain
lion competed for land and food. Cougars were
pests, a nuisance and they were hunted aggres-
sively. Though secretive and crepuscular animals
who are rarely seen in the wild, they are easily
tracked down and treed by dogs, an irony since
tree-climbing is a natural defense against their
main predator, the wolf. Once up a tree, a big
cat is target practice, and by 1950, the eastern
cougar was presumed extinct.
But not in the imagination. In our current
culture, the mountain lion is used to name
sports teams and brand athletic shoes, but it’s
also steeped in ancient mythology and lore. It’s
an animal known by an uncommon variety of
names: cougar, puma, mountain lion, panther,
painter, and catamount. The Nittany Lion. Its
agility and grace, its sleek, powerful body, its
regal carriage and intense, burning eyes that, at
the same time, seem to be coolly assessing its
surroundings—all these things make it one of
God’s most splendid creations.
No wonder people want to believe it still roams
the Pennsylvania mountains, and that dozens of
believers send photos, video stills and other “evi-
dence” that Kerry Geykis carefully sifts through,
only to tell them, no, that’s not a cougar. It’s a
bobcat. Or a coyote. It’s a dog. Or just a house cat.
Page 10
Joining the Team
Geykis started volunteering for the Eastern
Cougar Foundation about eight years ago. The
ECF’s mission statement, in part, advocates “res-
toration of viable cougar populations in suitable
areas of the eastern and central United States
through natural recolonization.” The foundation
also educates the public on “basic cougar biology
and how to coexist with our magnificent native
big cat.”
Geykis does his part by giving an approxi-
mately one-hour PowerPoint presentation to
interested groups that range from five to 200
people. He is sixty-five years old—but looks
twenty years younger—and resembles a less-
burly version of Ernest Hemingway. He has the
energy level of a washing machine on spin cycle.
In addition to his timber-consulting business,
he is a world traveler, an avid outdoorsman and
kayaker, and a nature photographer. He and
Janet, his wife of almost forty years, live on land
he cleared in house his family built from the
timber and stones on their property. If that’s not
enough, he’s also novelist whose book Territories
was published in 2002.
For his presentation, Geykis starts with a brief
bio, feathering in some of the aforementioned
information, outlining his Peace Corps duty as
an eco-forester in Malaysia, and explaining that
he grew up near Pittsburgh. He hunted and
trapped extensively in that area as a young man
and mentions running into coyote when every-
body said they should not have been in western
Pennsylvania in the 1950s and early 1960s.
This is perhaps an unintentional subtext to the
MOUNTAIN HOME
Cougar by the cornfield? The feline figure circled above
was turned in as a possible cougar sighting. Researchers
determined it was a smaller cat, probably a bobcat.
presentation. In other words, just because some
experts believe cougars aren’t in the Twin Tiers,
it doesn’t mean they aren’t. He graduated from
West Virginia University in 1965 with a degree
in Timber and Wildlife Management. Four years
later, he got a job as a federal forester on Colville
Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State.
His big-cat fascination began there.
“On the reservation, I had my first experience
with a cougar,” Geykis said. “We were doing a
timber sale and we were having coffee with this
old Basque sheepherder every morning. One
morning when we arrived, he was on his horse
and he was very angry. A cougar had killed about
twenty of his sheep. I got ahold of the game war-
den, an Indian guy who became a good friend.
And I helped him in an attempt to capture the
cat. We saw it but were not able to get it in a
trap. We got cougar belly fur only. But then I got
really interested in that particular species.”
The sheepherder’s story, however, brings us to
the other side of the coin. Species reintroduction
is a touchy issue. There are many groups who
feel that predators such as cougars are not some
of God’s most splendid creatures. Many hunt-
ers don’t feel that way and game commissions
often support their point of view. Most farmers
with livestock won’t feel that way, no matter
how many reparation programs are introduced.
Hikers who think they love cougars may change
their tune when confronted by a six-foot-long,
150-pound, growling, hissing cat that thinks it
has the right of way on the trail.
NOVEMBER 2007

Humans are often curious animals. They move
to the woods or camp in the wild to be closer
to nature but many are then disconcerted when
nature—in the form of foraging bears, deer that
chew up gardens and flowers, or timber rattlers
that cross their path—intrude on their islands of
civilization. They often say they want “nature”
but it often means a Disneyfied world where
animals are anthropomorphic, where wolves are
mean and Bambi is cute.
Speaking of wolves, in June 2006, The Chris-
tian Science Monitor reported on the ramifica-
tions of their successful reintroduction into
Idaho. Successful in the sense that the wolves,
brought in from Canada, blossomed in their
NOVEMBER 2007
Above: Eastern Cougar Foundation researcher Kerry
Geykis uses a map from another organization, the Cougar
Network, to show how mountain lions from western states
may be moving east. The green areas indicate the cougar’s
current habitat, including a small section of Florida that is
home to the Florida panther. The blue dots represent what
Cougar Network defines as Class 1 Confirmations: a dead
or captured cougar; photographs and video; and DNA
evidence such as hair or scat. The pink dots are Class 2
Confirmations: tracks or other tangible, physical evidence.
Right: The Eastern Cougar: Historic Accounts; Scientific
Investigations; New Evidence is just part of the extensive
literature about the eastern cat.
new habitat. Conservationists were pleased but
opposition groups, such as the Idaho Anti-Wolf
Coalition, pushed “for a voter initiative that
would mandate the removal of more than 500
wolves in the state’s backcountry ‘by whatever
means necessary.’”
A joint state and federal plan was drawn up as
a compromise. In it, “the state proposed killing
as many as 51 wolves in north-central Idaho in
order to increase the elk herds favored by hunt-
ers,” the newspaper reported.
Coalition head Ron Gillett of Stanley, Idaho,
was not impressed. He told the Monitor reporter:
“There’s only one way to manage Canadian
wolves in Idaho. Get rid of them.”
The Cat Map
Geykis figures he’s spent more than twenty
years looking into cougar sightings and his
PowerPoint show is a smorgasbord of ludicrously
poor documentation, outright fraud, photos that
took a good while to disprove, and a lot of stuff
in the middle. But before he gets to the sight-
ings, he lays the groundwork.
MOUNTAIN HOME
The cougar is also native to much of Central
and South America, and though eradicated in
most of the eastern United States, a small pocket
of Florida panthers live in and around the
Everglades, all of which once again points to the
lion’s adaptability.
“That population in Florida, they say, is be-
tween eighty and 100,” Geykis said. “I suspect
it’s probably more. It was down to in the thirties
maybe fifteen or twenty years ago; it was go-
ing in the tubes. They were becoming inbred,
smaller, kinky animals.”
Then females from Western states, which have
thriving populations, were brought in under the
guidance of David Maehr, a biologist on ECF’s
board of directors. They now have a regenerating
population in Florida. But it’s always difficult to
maintain, Geykis said, because of roadkill and
habitat loss. Also, adult male cougars will kill
immature cougars without compunction, seeing
them as a threat to their dominance and access
to females.
“Nobody can be in their territory except the
female,” he said. “And if there’s a fight over
food, they may kill the female.”
Which brings Geykis’s presentation to a map
of current cougar habitat from another organi-
zation, Cougar Network, which describes itself
as nonpartisan: They don’t advocate recolo-
nization in the East but also don’t oppose it.
Geykis also described Cougar Network as
more “conservative.” For them, “confirmed”
cats in the East need pure North American
cougar DNA.
Cougar Network’s map shows a bright green
area that begins at the far edge of the high
plains from Texas north to Montana and goes
all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Two smaller
green patches cover South Dakota’s Badlands
and Florida’s Everglades. A concentration of
blue and pink dots covers much of the Great
Plains. There’s a smattering of dots in the East.
The blues represent what Cougar Network
defines as Class 1 Confirmations: a dead or
captured cougar; photographs and video; and
DNA evidence such as hair or scat. The pinks
are Class 2 Confirmations: tracks or other tan-
gible, physical evidence, such as prey carcasses,
microscopic hair recognition and thin-layer
chromatography of scat, verified by a qualified
professional.
Geykis, pointing to the map, drew atten-
tion to “one big scraggly line going out of Lake
Superior and all of the way down to Louisiana.”
That’s the Mississippi River, he explained, the
biggest obstacle to the Western cougar’s move
eastward.
“If you look at that really closely,” he said, “it
shows one blue on Michigan’s upper peninsula
Please See Cougar on page 12
Page11
Cougar continued from page 11
that was hit years ago, but all we have is hair
there. Cougar Net only takes evidence that they
can substantiate through game commissions.
And most of them don’t want it; they don’t want
to deal with it.
“If you look at Illinois, there are two on the
east side of the Mississippi. Those are the only
two we’re aware of that have been killed on the
east side of the Mississippi. There are probably
more but not a hell of a lot.”
As the cougar population grows in the West,
young cougars will naturally look for land in
which to hunt. That’s pushing the big cats east-
ward and into Canada.
A South Dakota cougar population has
gown so large, Geykis said, that hunting cats
is now legal there.
“They’re too numerous. And a lot of the ones
coming east through the North Country are
COUGARS . . .
Were native throughout most of North and
South America when Europeans arrived. Except
for tundra, which offers no cover from which to
ambush prey, cougars lived in every type of habitat
from coastal swamps to high mountains.
Have a range that depends on abundance of prey
and type of ambush cover. Can be thirty square
miles in parts of Nevada or 400 in Florida where
swamps don’t support many deer. Male’s larger
range may overlap the smaller ranges of several
females.
As adults weigh 140 pounds on average and are
seven feet from nose to tip of a tail that’s almost as
long as the body. Brown to gray in color above and
whitish below. Black cougars have been reported in
South America. Cubs’ spots fade during first year.
Have binocular vision for excellent depth per-
ception and judging distances.Vision enables night
hunting. Can detect ultrasonic frequencies and cup-
shaped, rounded ears move together or indepen-
dently in direction of sound.
Communicate through scent in urine and feces
deposited in scratched-up areas called “scrapes”
that help maintain a social network based on mutual
avoidance.
Can’t roar but make a variety of sounds: chirps,
peeps, purrs, growls, moans, whistles, and bloodcur-
dling screams.
Prefer deer and other ungulates but will eat birds,
reptiles and amphibians, and occasionally insects.
Drag prey out of sight and cover it with leaves, grass,
or twigs. Don’t like carrion, which saved them from
Western poisoned-bait campaigns that killed other
predators such as bears and eagles.
Have thirty teeth.They include large canines that
deliver a lethal bite, preferably at the back of the neck.
coming from South Dakota. One of theirs, with
a GPS collar on it made it to Oklahoma, about
700 miles away and was killed there. One of
them went into Manitoba, Canada, and they
lost the circuit.”
The Mississippi River has slowed down east-
ward migration, Geykis said, but that’s not the
sole factor. Most of the animals killed are young,
sexually immature males that females won’t
come near.
“They’re hungry; they’re stupid with testos-
terone,” Geykis said, adding that looking at
the reports of their roadkill is “like looking at a
police report of a DUI.”
“It hasn’t happened in the East, but they’re
already in the Midwest. You can’t really say there
is a population, but they are definitely there.
They’re in the cornfields in Iowa and those
people haven’t had them for 100 years. So they
are really there. They’ve got roadkill, and that is
probably your best indicator.”
Other specialized teeth slice and shear flesh.
Are solitary hunters that ambush rather than pur-
sue. Keep low to the ground and use available cover.
When close enough to prey, they explode in a sprint
of up to thirty-five miles an hour.
Mate at two years and remain together only for
a few days to a week. Three-month gestation after
which mother raises litter of two to four cubs alone.
Young stay with their mother until they are seventeen
to twenty-three months old. Females often stay close
to their mother’s home range, but males usually travel
farther away, sometimes hundreds of miles.Young
males are at serious risk of fatal attack from all adult
males, including their father.
Tracks, Scat, and
Photographs
The presentation shifts to hard evidence and
how to document a sighting. Geykis can tell
pretty quickly whether a track belongs to a cou-
gar and scat can be processed for DNA, especial-
ly if the sample is preserved carefully. But much
of the cougar-sighting evidence comes to Geykis
and ECF volunteers as photographs. And the eye
can play tricks. Not to mention a trickster armed
with Photoshop or another type of photo-ma-
nipulation software.
Distance is one of the problems cougar
identification and bobcats play a big part in that
problem. Pennsylvania’s bobcat population is
huge, said Geykis, but most people have never
seen one. They are much smaller—a typical
male bobcat is three feet long and weighs about
Female cougars have litters of two to four cubs.
Live up to twelve years and up to twenty in captivity.
Can jump fifteen feet high and forty feet wide,
climb trees and swim rivers. Four toes on the hind
foot. Fifth toe on larger front foot is a dewclaw or
“thumb” that doesn’t touch ground but can grasp
prey. Three lobes on heel pad. Claws are kept re-
tracted, which helps keep the points sharp, enables
quiet stalking, and prevents them from registering
on tracks.
From the Eastern Cougar Foundation
Photo courtesy Washington Department of Fish
and Wildlife
twenty-five pounds while male cou-
gars are twice that length and weigh
about 140 pounds on average—but
they look similar to cougars and
distance increases the margin of
error for the inexperienced cougar
spotter.
Geykis flipped the switch and
showed a large cat prowling in the
woods at twilight or dawn. “That
just came in several days ago,” he
said. “Came in as a picture of a cou-
gar. It’s pretty obviously a bobcat.
There’s no question in my mind.But,
again, people say, ‘I’ve seen bobcats
all my life.’ Chances are they haven’t.
They haven’t seen a lot of them.
That’s pretty darn obvious.”
He hit the switch again and the
screen showed another large cat
with its back to the camera sitting
in the woods on a bright, sunny
day. The on-screen captions read:
“There are many hundreds, even
thousands of sightings in PA, the
East” and “Sightings. What is
Real?”
“That came from Wellsboro,
Pennsylvania. Now we’re getting
local. I heard about it and I went
to see it. Quite a cougar.” Geykis
smiled. “But that’s a good shot of a
bobcat. It’s definitely not a cougar.
That one’s a fairly tough one. You
can’t see the tail. You can’t really see
body. You have to look really closely
to see the points on the ears.
“It’s interesting but it’s a PA
bobcat. And a lot of people tell me
that’s a cougar even though I can
see spots from here. I can tell by
the configuration of musculature;
it’s not just about the tail. People
send in photos of house cats and
it’s hard for me to believe that they
mistake it for a cougar. But they
do.”
Twin Tiers
Potential
Geykis begins winding down the
presentation by showing a map of
possible cougar habitat in the East.
Pennsylvania is represented by two
large swaths, one of which roughly
follows the Appalachian Trail; the
other is more or less “The Penn-
sylvania Wilds” area designated by
the commonwealth. Part of that
bumps up into New York near Alle-
gany State Park north of Bradford,
Pennsylvania. Another spot in New People were adamant and they weren’t
York is in the Adirondacks with the
Lake Placid-Saranac Lake area as its
lying to me. I mean, most of them
center. weren’t lying—we’ve caught a couple
Geykis said he’s hopeful that liars—but, in the East, most of them
recolonization will take place here
but he’s aware of the obstacles and really thought they had seen a cougar.
opposition that will crop up if
cougars appear in the area. Cougar
attacks are infrequent and deaths —Kerry Geykis
from attacks rarer still. But statistics Eastern Cougar Foundation
point to an increase of attacks and
fatalities as suburbs and exurbs en-
croach on the cougar’s habitat. And
because of conservation measures—
it’s illegal, for instance, to hunt
cougars now in California—their
population has grown. Coexistence
will be a delicate dance. Wikipe-
dia tells us there “have been 108
confirmed attacks on humans with
twenty fatalities in North America
since 1890, fifty of the incidents
having occurred since 1991. Cali-
fornia has seen a dozen attacks since
1986 (after just three from 1890 to
1985), including three fatalities.”
Geykis can tell horror stories.
Such as a young man killed by a
cougar in Colorado as he ran in
the woods behind a school. When
they found him, the cougar was still
guarding the kill.
Humans, used to cuddly, domes-
ticated house cats, might shudder
at that horror, but the cougar’s be-
havior is dictated by nature, which
is not cruel but concerned strictly
with survival. It normally sees us as
something to avoid. It would rather
avoid us than attack us because we
are pretty big as mammals go and
not its natural prey. As Geykis said,
a cougar is not really built to kill
humans, though obviously it can.
It does not see us as benefactors
and can’t show appreciation, which
is something humans desire as
benefactors.
“But this is the story,” Geykis
said. “The people in Colorado really
wanted the cougars to come in.
And they still do. But they’ve wised
up a little bit about inviting them
in your yard. It’s like a bear. When
you feed it, you’ve created a situa-
tion where you’re going to kill the
bear when you feed it. And they
loved to see the cougars coming in.
John Gallant has the last official recorded mountain lion killing in Pennsylvania. That
But then the cougars started hunt- mountain-lion killing, which occurred in Crawford County in 1967, doesn’t prove whether the
ing them.” cat was native to the East since it could have escaped from a private zoo.