Cougars are here?

It seems there may be cougars in the area.  A neighbor reports to my wife that his wife saw one in their back yard, not exactly clear when though.  The Connecticut DEP seems to take a very low key stance on this issue, or 'mountain lions are not native to the Northeast'.  Supposedly the cougars home base is on West Rock. 

Obviously, this might just be unreliable witnesses, though my wife thinks they are credible (they are hunters and have property out West). 

Update #1: there's a book out about cougars in suburbia, mostly in Denver,   “The Beast in the Garden” by David Baron. Reviewed here by Chicagoboyz. Cougars eat deer and move from nocturnal to daytime hunting. 

Update #2: The Norwich Chronicle reports 'Big Cats' are just a big myth. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service also has an eastern Cougar web site. See also the Cougar Network.  Really very few confirmed cougar sightings in the Northeast:

There are a modest number of confirmations in the Northeast. Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick and Quebec wildlife personnel are taking credible cougar reports very seriously. The origin of cougars found in this area is still a mystery, since the Northeast region is very distant from known populations in the West and Midwest.   There is no evidence of a breeding population, and most cougar experts believe that any animals in this region are almost certainly of captive origin. The presence of South American genotypes in many of the DNA positive hair samples indicates that at least some of these animals are of captive origin.  The occurrence of some of these samples in seemingly unsuitable Boreal habitat also raises questions.

Comments

[Doug Gollin]

Up in the Berkshires, where I teach, my two colleagues who work in our local forests both agree that there may be some rare and occasional cougars. There is some evidence that they may be in New England, but populations, if any, are tiny and may simply reflect escapes. It has been pointed out that there is no roadkill evidence -- usually a good indication of the presence of a species. There is almost certainly no breeding population.

Cougars cover a large territorial range, so it is unlikely that there "are cougars on West Rock". However, there could very well be bobcats.

A more likely arrival in the next twenty years or so will be wolves, which are likely at some point to cross the St. Lawrence waterway. Again, a few individuals do not make a population, but there seems to be some likelihood that we will eventually get wolves back in the northeast, with lots of deer to sustain them. The likelihood for human-wolf conflicts is very high, and it will be a complicated and messy situation.

See the work of William Lynn, Tufts University, for more on this subject.

Just had breakfast with some people who know this subject very, very well. They say that there are certainly breeding populations of cougars in New England but that it is convenient for state and federal wildlife officials to ignore or deny this. Apparently, if their presence were confirmed, they would be required to pursue costly management practices and enforce a variety of unpopular regulations, while budgets of the state agencies (though not federal ones) are typically based on revenues from hunting licenses. Since these animals wouldn't be hunted, there is no incentive for the agencies to "find" them... And from a conservation standpoint, they see no urgency to manage the populations, which are thought to be doing quite well without any intervention.