Cougar Killed in Lake George

LAKE GEORGE -- Environmental officials say a cougar killed by a car in Connecticut tramped through upstate New York last year, a rare sighting in a state where the big cats are believed to have been gone for more than a century.

Cindy Eggleston reported seeing the cat in her Lake George backyard in December. Her husband David, a former Department of Environmental Conservation colonel, and DEC officer Louis Gerrain took pictures of the tracks and gathered hairs.

When the cat was struck and killed in June, DNA analysis confirmed it was the same cougar.

Officials believe the healthy, 140-pound male started its journey in South Dakota and came about 2,000 miles.

Biologists believe there are about 100,000 cougars in North America, mostly in the west and rarely traveling more than 100 miles.

Read more: http://www.cbs6albany.com/articles/cougar-1287440-george-killed.html

oh you mean a real cougar not just a older female bar patron of which there are probably many in lake george on summer weekend evenings

There have been sitings of them down here in the Catskills...  But the DEC will deny it.

dmc_hunter wrote

There have been sitings of them down here in the Catskills...  But the DEC will deny it.

I don't know much about cats. But we see cat prints all the time in the woods in Johnsburg.

ONE time, I saw something I'd never seen before. Between the left and right side prints, you could clearly the imprint of a long straight tail.  Is that a cougar? We assumed it was.

I saw a bobcat at Gore two winters ago.  It ran across Upper Cloud right in front of me.