When I turned my head slowly to the left to scan the area for a possible approaching gobbler, the mountain lion suddenly burst from the woods into the open and sped in long leaps across the wide opening. He/she was obviously chasing something that I had not seen or heard, perhaps a rabbit. The cougar negotiated the 40-yard-wide power line right-of-way in about 8 bounds, entered the woods on my side without looking right or left and was gone.

The cat appeared to weigh about 100 pounds and was the typical tan/gray color. Its leg bones were big all the way to its feet and its tail was as long as its body and curled up at the end. It’s face was blunt with no prominent ears.

I hit my turkey yelper to try to turn it around and perhaps entice it to stalk my turkey decoys. But if he/she quit the chase in favor of a turkey dinner, I never saw it approach. And I watched my back side carefully for the next hour.

When was I privileged to view the panther? Last Saturday morning at 7:35. And where did this sighting take place? Here in Lauderdale County. Well, just barely. The adjoining property to the east is in Alabama.



Wide ranging cats



The Florida panther has ranged into Mississippi for many years. Talk with people who frequent the outdoors and you will find many who have seen cougars (catamounts, mountain lions, painters, panthers, pumas — all the same animal.) This carnivore has generated about as much folklore as have bears and wolves.

Strangers to the outdoors will often mistake large dogs, coyotes, foxes and just about any animal larger than a house cat for a fierce, marauding panther. Such sightings make for good storytelling and stretch imaginations beyond common limits. Wildlife specialists in Mississippi launch into skepticism mode upon hearing the first words of a mountain lion story because so many are mistaken identities.

I expected this reaction when I told a Wildlife Management Area manager years ago about the black panther I had seen. He said he would have rolled his eyes had I told him about the sighting two weeks earlier. But he listened intently because, as he told me, the wife of one of his employees had recently seen a large black cat on the same road as my sighting and it reacted the same way.

My estimation is that about 50 percent of the sightings reported refer to real cougars. Of course I talk with more “outdoor” folks than those who can mistake a small calf or a brown boulder for a lion. Wildlife officials may hear more from the latter, which fuels misgivings.

My lion sighting followed a very interesting experience that occurred earlier in the week on a hunt I made with Ricky Sullivan. We were just a couple miles north of where I saw the cat. Early in the morning, I heard an unusual call that caught my attention because it was quite loud and appeared to be coming from an animal being killed. Describing the sound is difficult, but it was somewhat like the moan/growl of a prowling tom cat, commonly heard at night. Yet the cries were much too loud to have come from a cat-size animal or even a fox or coyote-size beast.

The cries were one to three seconds in duration repeated ten or more times with the final sounds tailing off in volume. The series was repeated over a three hour period every 10 to 15 minutes. They came from mostly young planted pine cover and thickets. This appears to rule out some kind of large bird.



No small beast



The sounds were very near to me, yet Ricky heard a couple of them at a distance of half a mile. We talked on the way home about what the animal could be and could think of nothing except a mountain lion. No one was in the area using a varmint call.

That morning with Ricky I was on the south end of the property, nearest the location where I would see the big cat the following Saturday. Interesting.

I have seen two cougars in Colorado and glimpsed two others there. Now I have seen two in Mississippi and consider myself lucky.

I have often said that anyone who spends a lot of time in the outdoors will see many interesting and unusual sights. The currently reluctant turkeys kept me out there this time long enough to see a lion. I trust I won’t wait for a gobbler long enough to see a camel!