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Maine officials taking big cat photo seriously

By Kathryn Skelton , Staff Writer

Friday, June 29, 2007

A photo making e-mail rounds Thursday [June 28, 2007] that shows what looks like a big, rare cat in a Sidney backyard is real, according to the Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife spokesman.

Whether that’s actually a mountain lion leaning on a rock wall is up in the air. The cat’s tail, the easiest way to tell a bobcat from a mountain lion, is hidden by a tree.

“That’s why we’re sending someone out there,” said Mark Latti. “Maine doesn’t have a wild population of mountain lions.”

The picture came in to IFW on Thursday. He said the homeowner wants to be anonymous. A biologist will go out soon to look for other evidence, like tracks, and measure the size of the rocks where the cat stood to get a sense of scale.

Maine hasn’t had wild mountain lions since the late 1800s, Latti said. Vermont and New Hampshire don’t have them either.

“We do receive a handful of sightings a year,” he added. The last significant one was about six years ago in Monmouth. Plaster casts were made of what turned out to be mountain lion tracks, “but we never saw it again.”

In the mid-1990s, mountain lion hair was found in Cape Elizabeth.

The animals live mostly out West and sometimes make headlines with vicious attacks. According to SanDiegoZoo.org, the male mountain lion can get up to six feet long and 227 pounds.

Central Maine Medical Center spokesman Randy Dustin had a friend send him the photo with a note that read, “This thing ran in front of me the other night in Sidney.” It was on the Turnpike and the friend thought he’d been seeing things.