By TOM MOONEY Publication Date: December 16, 2012 Page: MAIN_01 Section: News Zone: MAIN Edition: 1

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1 Shedding light on a mountain lion mystery By TOM MOONEY Publication Date: December 16, 2012 Page: MAIN_01 Section: News Zone: MAIN Edition: 1 SOUTH KINGSTOWN -- Two months before a South Dakota cougar's astonishing journey ended fatally last year on a Connecticut highway, Heather Meyer was startled awake by a "thump, thump, thump" across the porch of her Matunuck house. A moment later came the "growl," followed by "scuffling" by the side door where, after sunrise, Meyer would find blood, clumps of deer hair and a long drag mark stretching down her pea stone driveway. Had she gone to the door when she heard the commotion that April morning and flicked on an outside light, there's an excellent chance no biologist would have believed her observation. As it were, there would be plenty of official skepticism when in the hours to come six people would report seeing what isn't supposed to be here. People such as Karen Stackow, who lives 200 yards away, who saw it cross her neighborhood street before disappearing under some trees; who sprinted out to the main road in hopes of seeing it again but saw only two bicyclists stopped a distance away staring into the brush beside Meyer's driveway. "See anything crazy?" Stackow shouted to them. "Yes!" they screamed back. Now, 20 months after what was almost certainly a cougar that visited Matunuck, a review of the state warden's thorough report of the incident by three national cougar authorities has yielded not only more corroboration but also a likely hypothesis of where the mythical animal, officially extinct in New England, came from. Rhode Island game warden Michael DiPietro pulled into Meyer's driveway off Matunuck School House Road late in the afternoon of April 9, A warden for 28 years, DiPietro has heard of occasional sightings in Rhode Island of cougars, or mountain lions as they're also called. But like scores of sightings around New England over the decades, confirmation has always proved elusive. Without hard evidence, like a carcass, cougar hair or scat, state and federal biologists have been skeptical about sightings of an animal believed gone for more than a century. Misidentifications, they conclude. In the rare instances when sightings have been

2 confirmed, wildlife experts have ruled that the cougars were released pets after genetic testing showed they originated in South America or the West. In fact, one month before the life-and-death drama played out beside Heather Meyer's house, a five-year study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the eastern cougar was extinct. That, of course, didn't exclude their western cousins from making a long trip. DiPietro had never seen a cougar in Rhode Island, but he felt his belief rising as he followed the clumps of deer hair and drag marks down Meyer's driveway to a fresh-killed deer buried in an adjacent thicket under leaves, dirt and pine needles. He'd seen deer dragged by other predators before, but what he saw at his feet "made the hair on the back of my neck stand up." In typical cougar fashion, the deer had been well buried and its abdomen hair neatly nibbled back in a semicircle before the belly was chewed open. Cougars will first dine on the organs of prey, unlike coyotes, which chew the hind quarters. This deer's hindquarters had been untouched. The big cat had also left clear prints pressed into the ground. They were too big for a bobcat and lacked the claw marks of a bear. "Normally, I'm not afraid of anything," says DiPietro, a stocky man and lifelong hunter, "but as soon as I saw that, I went back to the truck for the shotgun and loaded it. I knew I had never seen anything like this." DiPietro carried the shotgun as he kept taking photographs; better to be cautious in case this creature returned for its dinner. DiPietro's conviction that he was investigating a cougar attack would grow so strong over the next 24 hours that, after a dismissive biologist from the Department of Environmental Management ruled the deer had died from a car strike, DiPietro retrieved the deer carcass from a dump, skinned back its neck fur and discovered the signature puncture bites along its throat and spine. Mark McCollough, the lead cougar biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in New England, was one of the experts who reviewed DiPietro's four-page narrative report and 35 photographs at the request of The Providence Journal. He says the 2-inch-wide puncture wounds in the deer's neck that DiPietro uncovered were in size and location a classic cougar bite -- and too big for a bobcat. Further, McCollough found one of DiPietro's photographs equally telling. It showed how the deer's abdomen fur had been nibbled short in that semicircle shape. Cougars "sort of clean the area and clip it with their teeth" before ripping open the animal, he said. "That is

3 quite different from bears" or any other predators. Chuck Anderson, with the mammal research section of Colorado's Parks and Wildlife Department, said: "After reviewing the report, I am convinced it is a cougar kill." Anderson - who studies Colorado's cougar population, estimated at about 3,000 animals, many living in the suburbs - said, "The caching, tooth punctures, carcass entry, tracks" are all "typical of cougar predation behavior." The proximity of this cat with the one that met its demise 100 miles away on a highway in Milford, Conn., two months later "certainly makes you wonder" if they weren't the same animal, said Anderson. DiPietro also had eyewitness accounts from six people, all of whom had seen the cat within a 30-minute period on the afternoon of April 9, 2011, in Matunuck's community of farm fields and hedges. All the sightings were within 500 yards of the buried deer near Meyer's driveway. Karen Stackow says she knew that what she had seen was so extraordinary that she hopped in her car afterward and tracked down the bicyclists she had shouted to so she had their names and phone numbers to give to an investigating warden. She gave that information to DiPietro when he came by to investigate Meyer's call of an animal attack. Chip Longo and Marina Ayrapetov, who live off Route 1 in Wakefield, would tell DiPietro they had seen the cat cross Matunuck School House Road moments after Stackow lost sight of it on her street, Seabreeze Terrance. The bicycling couple said it crossed in front of them at 30 yards away. Like Stackow's description, the bicyclists reported seeing an "extremely large cat" of about 100 pounds, uniformly tan. "The body was as long as one lane of the road with a 3- foot-long tail" and stood 2 to 3 feet tall. Michael Joyce, a neighbor of Stackow's, drove by with his wife and teenage son not long after the cat had crossed Matunuck School House Road. Stackow told them what she had seen. "They didn't initially believe me," says Stackow, but decided to go take a ride. The Joyces didn't have to go far. On Cards Pond Road, which parallels Matunuck School House Road, Michael Joyce swung to one side and stopped. There, 70 yards away, the cat loped across a field. All three Joyces told DiPietro that the animal "looked like a long, tan big cat that stood 3 feet tall and a body 3 feet long with a 3-foot-long tail." Stackow says the Joyces swung back around to her house afterward to report: "We believe you now!" "It was the most gorgeous animal I've ever seen," says Stackow. But she and several local Matunuck residents aren't buying the experts' theory of where

4 the cat may have came from. Ken Miller, president of The Cougar Network, a nonprofit research group that for a decade has been charting the western cougar's migration east, says the cougar seen in Matunuck in April was very likely the same cougar struck and killed in Connecticut in June That cat, a young male who weighed 140 pounds, had been tracked from South Dakota through DNA evidence collected in at least three other states it had crossed through. Its record-breaking, 1,500-mile journey has stunned scientists, says McCollough with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. All mammals disperse from where they were born as a way to avoid in-breeding. But prior to the South Dakota cougar's travels, the farthest known cougar dispersal was about 640 miles, says McCollough. Miller says the Connecticut cougar's journey was a "one-in-a-million kind of thing." That a different cat would be seen so close and around the same time is highly unlikely. Considering cougars can travel 20 or 30 miles a day without effort, chances are much better it was the same animal, says Miller. "It is the one [hypothesis] that makes the most sense," he says, "because, where else would it have come from? It's been pretty much determined that there isn't a resident population [of cougars] in New England." McCollough says "it's a good hypothesis" that the Matunuck cougar and the Connecticut cougar were the same animal. But without DNA evidence from the Matunuck cougar, "I can't prove it one way or another." Cougar hair and scat samples collected in Minnesota, Wisconsin, St. George, N.Y., and finally Milford, Conn., provided the DNA that confirmed the South Dakota cat's incredible journey. In March 2011, one month before the Matunuck cougar sighting, wildlife experts also found what were believed to be prints of a cougar traveling south in the snow near the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts, said McCollough. But the prints melted. He wonders: Was that the cougar moving toward Matunuck? In recent years, The Cougar Network has logged cougar dispersals into Midwest states such as Iowa, Missouri and Illinois. One limiting factor to the animal's eastern migration, says McCollough, is that virtually all the cats dispersing have been young males. While males may travel hundreds of miles to establish new territories, females generally don't move far from where they were born. The cats, therefore, are slow to establish new breeding populations.

5 The meanderings of the South Dakota cougar -- which included jaunts into the upscale community of Greenwich, Conn., 70 miles from New York City -- "gave pause to all cougar biologists to think carefully about the subsequent reports we get," says McCollough. Karen Stackow says she knows the Matunuck cougar was not the same cat that died on the Connecticut highway because "others have seen it since. When they see it, they call me. Since that day I've heard of at least five sightings from people that I know and respect." Stackow has erected a trail camera on her property in hopes of capturing the image of the animal that she says "has changed my life." "The beauty of that animal and its power makes me more aware of the beauty and power of everything I see every day," she says. She's waiting for that trail camera to prove cougars aren't ghosts; that they're out there. At least one was.