I am so glad they finally caught one. A lot of people can now 'eat crow'. Thanks for the picture since I think they will have a hard time hiding this one. Of course, tomorrow they will try to tell us it was someone's large house cat. LOL

I know a lot of people around the Wichita Refuge who say they've seen them.

Thanks for sharing. One was reported in Ray Harrel Nature Park several years ago, but I think there were lots of doubts as to whether it was truly a Mountain lion. This shows that they are around.

Sandy

We know that they are in the State since lots of people have seen them. Our own Okiedawn came face to face with one and many others have been seen in her area.

I grew up tromping through the woods of southern Oklahoma so that is not hard for me to believe, because I know the area. My father, who was an old man when I was born always told stories of the black long tailed cats that they saw and they all called them panthers.

I always wonder if the Fish and Game folks spend too much time behind a desk because they never seem to see one. They seem to suffer from the see no evil, hear no evil, and deny it if in doubt syndrome.

It is really scary when they are being seen in metro areas. It will be interesting to hear the explanation.

It is a cat for sure. And we all know they are around. I assume they will pull blood for a DNA test. I know they do around here some. You can't tell a lot from the picture. But as sleek as she looks it could be a raised one that got away. I will be interested to see what they say. There has been more activity in my area also. This one is a female so if a wild one that will prove there are females in OK besides the Panhandle. Jay

This story takes my memory back to a place it doesn't want to go.

I especially like the last line of the story about the lions being active during the day on land not disturbed by humans.

That explains it! Now we know what is wrong with "my" mountain lion. He (or she) is stupid and didn't read the memo about only going out in the daylight hours on land not disturbed by man. Or, maybe our place looks so wild that he or she didn't realize the land had been disturbed by man (or woman). If that's the case, the poor thing must have been as shocked at seeing me as I was at seeing it.

I've had three encounters, each more frightening than the previous ones. I don't want to have a fourth.

I'm glad they were able to tranquilize it and capture it quickly.

Here is a link that might be useful: Here's The Link

Yikes! That's just a little more than a mile from where I'm moving to this week. I expect it'll be different up there, but mountain lions? Geez!!!
Carol

Several people in the Peggs/Locust Grove area have been hearing them and seeing their tracks.

I would caution anyone against jumping to the conclusion this is a "wild" cat. Even though there have been a LOT of confirmations in Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, etc. in the last year, there have been no females or immature ones anywhere outside of their home range that now extends into the tip of the Oklahoma panhandle and in northwest Nebraska.

Oklahoma has not seen the number of confirmations that you would expect when compared to the other states north and east of us and that is probably because the populations in south and west Texas, and in the tip of the panhandle are not growing like the ones in the Dakotas and nebraska are. There are now dozens of young males each year that go east, south, or north from the Black Hills base population and are being photographed or killed in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and especially Missouri. Oklahoma has seen almost none.

Again, there is no such thing as a black mountian lion, and almost all sightings and "hearings" of true cougars in Oklahoma are mistaken identity. All the cougars in Oklahoma (except the panhandle population) up to this point are young males that are out searching for home ranges that have females and they do NOT establish home ranges anywhere they roam since there are no females to be found in any of these new areas YET.

Still, there has to be a first case of a female moving east onto the plains and establishing a home range, and this would be the first one in any of our generations if it turns out to be a wild one. There are MANY more captive cougars in this state than wild ones and I'm sure that since it is a female they will have it checked out. If it is a wild one it will make national news and will be the biggest mountain lion news in this country in 50 years (but don't hold your breath).

FINALLY! I live just NW of that location, in SE Osage Co., in a rural area and I know for a fact that there are these types of cats out here. I was driving home late one night on a rural road (it was paved but definately in the boonies) and my car headlights caught one directly in the headlights going around a curve. I thought I was going to flip out! It was standing there right out in the open on the side of the road and it seemed like it froze in the lights for a second and then ran off. I'm not the type of person to exaggerate or prone to hysteria but when I got home (I was about 1/2 mile from my house) I thought my husband was going to die laughing at me. He changed his mind however, about a week or so later when I was working on the property and called him down to show him tracks I found. They were DEFINATELY cat tracks but they were HUGE. We have several cats and you could have put 4 regular cat prints in one of those I found. They were in soft mud and trailed about 50 feet until they went into a really weedy/tall grass area where we didn't continue to look due to ticks/chiggers/snakes. My husband sure changed his tune after seeing the tracks. He thought it was a bobcat though. But I know what I saw on the side of the road that night. I've always believed since then that they are in the boonies out here probably going after all the deer/rabbits/possums/foxes, etc. To me, this just validates what I saw that night.

Thats 4 blocks from my house. I am not suprised given all the wildlife I see. This would probably explain why my akita has been on edge for the last week. The neighborhood backs up to a huge greenspace and I know for a fact there are deer so it does not shock me that a lion would find it handy to move in to...

Welcome to the neighborhood carol. =)

Well, it was covered in ticks, which means it has spent a lot of time in the wild. And read about the comment below this news article. Someone else spotted one in Chouteau.

Here is a link that might be useful: Mountain Lion

a follow up on my above post.

Here is a link that might be useful: Mountain Lion Wild?

There is nothing new at this point. To me that means there is a real chance it is wild since they didn't see any obvious signs on the initial inspection. A lot of times there is obvious evidence with the claws, teeth, markings etc when it was recently released.

On the side of being wild:

- It was the weight and age expected of individuals dispersing into new areas to find home ranges.

- It was not comforatable around people.

- It had enough ticks to mean it was roaming for at least a week or two.

On the side of NOT being a wild, native cat:

- It is female.

- There are no reproducing cougars within at least a few hundred miles and females do not disperse that far from home, just males.

- The cougar was not behaving "normally" when caught (but any female dispersing this far would not be normal anyway).

- Oklahoma has not seen near as many cougars as other states this far east in the last few years meaning the saturated home areas are way to our north and the nearest home areas are not increasing much if any in population, so why here for the first female this far east.

From the latest info coming out of the zoo, they have completed the physical exam and there is no evidence of past captivity. All evidence so far points to there being a chance it is a native cat, or at least one that was released for a longer period of time than they usually last in the wild.

It had a large parasitic load and was in overall poor health, which could explain its unusual behavior before capture. It also is uncomfortable around people.

I have not heard how long it takes for the tests to come back to tell what area of the country it is most likely from. I'd give it a 50/50 chance of being wild.

People are forgetting just a couple of years ago in Broken Arrow they had one coming to a local park and they hired a tracker.I do not know how it came out.But this one was only 3 miles north of me!

Now, y'all are scaring me with all this talk. I do not want them here. Been there, done that.

Tulsacityfarmer, I had two separate ones visit me about six or eight weeks apart a couple of summers back. Both times they were near my veggie garden fence. It scared the you-know-what out of me and for a long time I never went to the garden alone. In fact, I barely went out to the garden at all for a while. I just hibernated inside.

One was recently spotted on our property by a neighbor. I simply refuse to think about it. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to believe one is here again, or still here, or whatever. My neighbor is a nice, normal, sane person and if she says she saw it, I believe her. But, I don't want for it to be true all the same.

Dawn

I am hoping that this was an isolated incident and not the begining of a domain expansion into our area. I would really hate to have to make sure to have to take my dog with me and make sure I am armed every time I went to play around with my plants...Although I have to admit that there is a part of me that is pretty sure my 140lb dog can take a lowly 70lb varmint of a feline like what they found, I know that the big full grown ones can kill even the giant breed dogs like akita and I would hate to lose my furry kid to some stinkin gato just because I wanted to go pick some tomatoes.

The chances of ever having reproducing populations in most of Oklahoma is very low. They travel too much and there is too much auto traffic and human density in almost all areas. Even the individual ones getting into Missouri and Minnesota and similar places are too easily tracked, photographed and seen to have much chance of a long life.

The best (or worst) we could hope in the long run is to have a few isolated areas and individuals reproducing and start seeing a half dozen to a dozen killed every year by cars once the state population got up to about 50 to 100.

When I was a child growing up in Oklahoma, if you wanted to see a deer you had to go to a park like Lake Murray, and even there it was not a frequent thing. The deer hunters drove a long distance to hunt and I never saw a dead deer on the road. Today it is hard to take a drive and not see deer or even have them playing in your yard. I frequently see them dead on the road. So it would seem to me that our practices have provided a large food supply for the cats.

Dozens of people see cats in Oklahoma every year. As for the official wildlife employees, I will say, "Me thinketh thou protesteth too much".

Actually hundreds to thousands of people in Oklahoma see them every year. About half are black, and a lot see a momma and baby together. That should tell you how reliable these accounts are. Also, thousand are spotted east of the Mississippi each year and there is zero chance of being wild ones there other than the Florida population.

Wildlife officials have passed a law saying you can pretty much kill a cougar anytime for any reason (as the reproducing population of cougars made it into the extreme panhandle), and we have tens of thousands of trail cams to photograph them and millions of cars to kill them in their daily travels like they do in every other state where they live. It doesn't happen because we do not have resident population of wild cougars here - just the increasing number of young ones that roam through looking for new territories (as the populations increase out west). Maybe there are a dozen, maybe there are zero in the state at any time, but evidence strongly says there are no more than a handful at any time and they just pass through.