UPFRONT
Ghost Cats Are Ontario’s elusive mountain lions making a comeback?
An 1830 painting of a mountain lion in Louisiana, which is outside the animal’s current habitat.
It was a fall afternoon, around 3:30 p.m., and Frank Docherty was driving home to Little Britain, Ontario—100 kilometres northeast of Toronto—from his job at an auto plant in Oshawa. He was just a few minutes from town when, suddenly, something ran across the road. “It wasn’t a deer. It wasn’t a bear. It was in the distance, but I saw the tail. It was a cougar, I’m 100 per cent sure. It gave me goosebumps. I thought, They’re really here.” The animal Docherty almost certainly caught a glimpse of back in 2008 was a “The story has changed, Puma concolor, otherwise known as the and there’s strong cougar, mountain lion or puma. Native evidence now that to North, Central and South America, the species retreated to roughly one-third cougars are migrating of its historical range in Canada and here from the west.” the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, surviving in the less-populated western expanses of both countries. By the 1940s the mountain lion was considered extirpated from eastern North America, and since 2008 the animal has been listed as endangered in Ontario. (In 2018, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct,
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although that subspecies is now seen as a misnomer by wildlife scientists who believe there’s only one type of cougar in the Americas.) Despite this decline and the elusiveness of big cats, sporadic sightings have continued in Ontario over the past few decades, occasionally captured in grainy photos or videos, including one filmed by a woman who had an experience like Docherty’s while driving north of Kenora last December. Whether in the northwestern part of the province, the Collingwood area, the Ottawa Valley or anywhere in between, most of those cougars had likely escaped from or were intentionally released from captivity, says naturalist Michael Runtz, who may have spent more time in Ontario’s forests than anybody else in the past 50 years. Sometimes the tracks or dens of other species, like foxes or coyotes, are thought to belong to cougars, according to Runtz. Without scale, a bobcat or even an overweight house cat on a grassy hill can look like a much larger animal. “People see what they want to see, or misinterpret what they see,” says Runtz. “But the story has changed, and there’s strong evidence now that cougars are migrating here from the west.” 17
