Wife swears she saw a Mountain Lion Sunday morning in Perry County.....

[indiucky]

I believe her......

At about 8:30 am EST (7:30 am local) I left our little shack to run up to the quickie mart (10 mile round trip) to get some breakfast...To you city dwellers questioning how good breakfast can be at a rural quickie mart let me just say...Like Grandma's...Rural quickie marts take their food making serious.....I left her sitting on the front porch sipping coffee and when I returned about 25 minutes later she was still there but had her "tub gun" (H&R 20 gauge with cut down stock and barrel) laying across her lap...

I raised my eyebrow up and said "Trouble in paradise and on the Lord's Day no less?"

"I saw a large animal...A cat...I think it was a mountain lion..."

"You mean a coyote..."

"No I mean a Mountain Lion..."

"Are you talking our bobcat?????"

"NO...I KNOW WHAT I SAW..."

I googled bobcat on my phone and hit google images and handed her the phone...

"YES!!! That's it right there..."

I grabbed my phone back and a photo of a mountain lion that was with the google bobcat images was clicked on....

Well things just got interesting...

We had six inches of rain Friday night...She pointed to the field across the road just over Oil Creek, the corner where I sometimes turkey hunt...I used a range finder once to check the distance and it's right at 240 yards, maybe a hair less, from the front porch....The farmer had put feed corn in last week so the ground was brown....A bluff rises up about 600 feet and levels to a plateau before dropping back down on our other property about 1.1 miles away...She said the animal came down the bluff (following the same trail the turkeys, coyotes, and deer use) and seem to be following something she thought...She then did an imitation of how it was walking using her hands and I thought, "Damn...That looks like how a cat would walk and...Damn...She looks pretty darn cute doing that...."

I said "Lets go look for tracks....The ground should still be soft enough" and off we went....Our boots were making tracks but not sinking in very deep...We crossed the first field and managed to ford Oil Creek without going over the top of our Mucks....We spread out and began searching for tracks...I found some coon tracks but nothing else...She kept insisting it was right by the creek but I told her if it was right by the creek she would not have been able to see it's whole body so I stood right where she was and backed up until I could see the front porch....



I began looking and spotted a large track...I saw the claw marks and called her over to tell her the bad news...Coyote track for sure...



I could see this track was probably a day old....Some debris in it and the small grass inside the track had popped back up...I then began to notice some other tracks running alongside this set of tracks...They were rounder, fresher, (the grass had not "popped" back up yet) with no sign of any claw marks......



This photo shows the two types of tracks in the same frame...



The field and the woods where the animal first appeared..You can not tell from the photo but twenty yards into the woods and you are heading straight up..



Here she is looking for tracks closer by the creek....



Here are the rest of the pictures of the tracks as best as I could take them...



My knife is 4.5 inches long....Notice how the blades of grass are still stuck to the earth and have not, "popped up" yet...





I called my buddy who is an ex C.O. and he forwarded them to another C.O. to get to the biologist for identification...I told him not to say we saw anything other than the tracks as I want their honest opinion...

My wife knew I was going to post this and is very shy about posting such things on the internet but she wanted you all to see this...I checked this morning on INGO and saw HK had a good weekend as well!!!! I told her that and asked her if she wanted me to post it in his thread and she said, "No sir...In six years of you being on INGO I never had a thread from something I did...I want BBI, Rustyhornet, Historian, Churchmouse etc... to see that I saw the mountain lion...Not you...You were too worried about getting biscuits and gravy so this is my post..."


So that's our story boys and girls...

 

[Cameramonkey]

Glad to hear wildlife is prospering. snakes, big cats, bears. hawks, eagles.

I recall 30 years ago you would never have seen any of those around here.

 

[DeadeyeChrista'sdad]

Sub 40 year olds still roll their eyes when I tell them we just didn't HAVE any deer around ECI when I was a kid. Now I've got a bald eagle nest just a few hundred yards downstream from the house. I love it! Lions, and eagles, (and turkeys) and bears, oh my!

 

[cosermann]

While there've been an number of unconfirmed sightings, there was a confirmed sighting in Greene County in 2015 iirc. Those tracks look about right.

Can be reported here - DNR: Report A Large Mammal

 

[indiucky]

While there've been an number of unconfirmed sightings, there was a confirmed sighting in Greene County in 2015 iirc.

Can be reported here - DNR: Report A Large Mammal

Our (former) local C.O. forwarded the photos to County C.O. and he has forwarded them to the DNR large mammal biologist....He said it might be awhile before we hear back from them....This was Sunday morning and we were due south about 70 miles from where HK saw his....

 

[CountryBoy19]

Must be something with the rain because I heard a 2nd-hand story of a sighting south of Jasper yesterday (the flooding may have flushed them up to higher ground if they're down that way).

 

[indiucky]

Must be something with the rain because I heard a 2nd-hand story of a sighting south of Jasper yesterday (the flooding may have flushed them up to higher ground if they're down that way).

We were 30 miles SE of Jasper...I think you are right on the rain putting them on the move....

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

Have you all got a game camera set up around your properties? Not that it would have picked up that cat that far away but no telling what's coming around while you're not there.

 

[indiucky]

Have you all got a game camera set up around your properties? Not that it would have picked up that cat that far away but no telling what's coming around while you're not there.

I can't figure out how to work the dang gone things......The field across the road from us is not ours so I wouldn't put any up there...

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

I can't figure out how to work the dang gone things......

Give it to a 12 year old and they'll set it up for you, old man.

 

[Bosshoss]

The most unusual thing about your story is the fact that you replaced " I stepped it off and it was 240 steps" with I used a range finder.
You also have a phone with pictures on it????

Tell Laura that she is








Ducking and running

 

[bobjones223]

Give it to a 12 year old and they'll set it up for you, old man.

Right....my daughter can actually get my phone to do all kinds of things other than make a call!

 

[Joe Silvertip]

Your neighbor told me he's been out at night with a couple of paw-soled slippers. . . . hate to break this to you.

 

[indiucky]

Your neighbor told me he's been out at night with a couple of paw-soled slippers. . . . hate to break this to you.

You'd have to have pretty big cajone's to walk around Perry County fields at night with paw soled slippers brother...

He was talking about "big pawed strippers"....Your New England Yankee upbringing makes you unable to pick up on our local vernacular....

 

[indiucky]

The most unusual thing about your story is the fact that you replaced " I stepped it off and it was 240 steps" with I used a range finder.
Ducking and running

My range finder...

Laura said you better run...

She got me a smart phone for Christmas....I have been getting razzed ever since...

 

[JeremiahJohnson]

The cougar I spotted 2014 was only 30 yards away and I had a guard rail to gage size, and watched it leap into the woods,...measured the jump...all that data but no hard physical evidence. I saw exactly where it went in the woods and found zero sign at all. You're lucky you've got tracks. Tell your wife I believe her. I've seen two in the 32 years working at NSWC Crane and I spend a good amount of time in the field. The sightings are rare, but they do exist.

The natural resources department here at Crane put cameras in the area for three months - nothing. They're not creatures of habit.

I've not found one eviscerated kill cache'...but I know there are cougars here. Nothing like laying your eyes on one to convince you.

 

[indiucky]

The cougar I spotted 2014 was only 30 yards away and I had a guard rail to gage size, and watched it leap into the woods,...measured the jump...all that data but no hard physical evidence. I saw exactly where it went in the woods and found zero sign at all. You're lucky you've got tracks. Tell your wife I believe her.

Timing was perfect....We got 6 inches of rain on Friday, field just planted last week, and the type of soil in the field seemed track friendly...I honestly don't think a 35 pound bobcat would have even left tracks you could see Sunday morning...You can see the sort of cracks in the dirt around the track showing the actual diameter...I weigh 170 and was in Mucks and my track was half the depth of the tracks we found (Of course my feet are more spread out than the critter's...) The coyote tracks were the day before and were twice as deep as the round tracks...

Wife read your post and said to thank you for believing her...

 

[mom45]

Very cool story, Indiucky!

We bought a couple of Stealth cams a few years ago and now have six. They are super easy to use. Trust me, if my husband can figure them out, anyone can. He has trouble with the TV remote some days.

I have the G42ng models that have the blacked out IR/ no glow so you can't see them at night. There is no visible flash and nothing lights up on them. I just got the last one a couple of weeks ago and they must have upgraded the sensors because this is the same model but is picking up things much farther away then the older ones do.

 

[Dino Bravo]

Sub 40 year olds still roll their eyes when I tell them we just didn't HAVE any deer around ECI when I was a kid. Now I've got a bald eagle nest just a few hundred yards downstream from the house. I love it! Lions, and eagles, (and turkeys) and bears, oh my!

Yep! When I was a kid and we drove to southern Indiana from Noblesville on weekends we thought it was a big deal to see buzzards south of Martinsville! And we also never saw Canada geese. I didn't see my first red tailed hawk around Central Indiana until the mid 1980s.

 

[oldpink]

It's a sign of a healthy environment when large predators can be supported by local fauna.
It's impossible to see how those tracks could be anything other than those of a cougar.
btw...am I the only one who finds it interesting that there are so many alternative names for this particular critter?
Examples: cougar, puma, panther, painter, mountain lion, catamount, and some of the real old-timer southerners even sometimes called them American Ghost, a reference to how incredibly stealthy they are.

Here's a nice extreme closeup of a cougar paw.