A cougar roaming in Squirrel Hill? Not likely
Residents of Squirrel Hill can sleep soundly knowing that the hilltop’s last mountain lion was probably killed when there was a wooden fort in the valley.
A fuzzy photograph posted to a social media site Wednesday caused “quite a stir” when neighbors discussed online the possibility they could have an actual mountain lion in the neighborhood. The posting claimed a structure in the background of the photo provided scale, showing the size of the animal to be about 4 feet long.
Patrick Snickles, an information and education supervisor for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, suggested that whoever let the cat out of the bag is mistaken.
“No way. That is an obscured picture of an orange house cat,” he said after examining the image.
The perspective is misleading, the tail is too short and the body does not conform to the shape of a mountain lion, he said.
“It’s so compact, no lankiness. When you look at a picture of a mountain lion, it has a distinctive head and neck. This head is right on top of the leg,” Mr. Snickles said.
Mountain lions, or cougars, are the fourth-largest cat species in the world, standing 24-35 inches at the shoulder. Adult males grow to nearly 8 feet long and weigh 117-220 pounds; females average 64- 141 pounds and stretch to about 6½ feet from nose to tail tip. Tails are proportionally long, reaching 25-37 inches.
The last wild cougar in Pennsylvania was killed in the late 1800s, according to the Game Commission. Its preserved remains are on display at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. In 2018, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Eastern mountain lion to be extinct. Many biologists, including those from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, said at the time they were certain that no wild breeding populations have existed in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states for 100 years or more.
Nevertheless, more than 1,000 sightings of big cats with long tails have been reported in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other Eastern states. Mountain lions continue to live as apex predators from the Rocky Mountain states to the Pacific Coast. The Michigan Department of Natural resources confirmed a mountain lion sighting in lower Michigan in 2018, and 12 were confirmed in the state’s Upper Peninsula in 2020. The Cougar Network, a nonprofit organization in Massachusetts, records mountain lion sightings throughout North America.
While some Squirrel Hill residents posted doubts about the cougar theory, it was suggested the animal could have escaped from a menagerie. The Game Commission prosecuted a Harrisburg man in 2002 for illegally possessing a cougar. Ownership of exotic animals is legal with licensing from various federal, state and local governmentagencies. In the past 20 years, confirmed reports of mountain lions in rural Pennsylvania were proved to be South American species that had escaped from private ownership. Suggestions that the animals were wild born — or Western mountain lions that had taken a long walk eastward — were debunked through DNA analysis of the animals’ corpse, hair or scat samples.
“We do take credible reports of mountain lion sightings seriously,” Mr. Snickles said. “If somebody thinks they have a true mountain lion, take samples of scat or fur and pictures or video and we’ll investigate.”