In October 2014, a trail camera snapped a grainy photo of a young mountain lion lurking around a deer feeder near Glen Rose, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

In August of last year, Brookhaven College in northwest Dallas County sent out an unusual warning: A mountain lion had been spotted on campus and students should take caution.

A month later, residents of Steiner Ranch just outside of Austin filed two reports of mountain lion sightings along a trail head in the wooded community.

In May, a woman called authorities to report that a mountain lion had attacked and killed her daughter’s horse near Cleburne, just an hour south of Dallas.

Of all the wild things that wander Texas, none comes close to the mystery of the mountain lion. People see them where they are not. They don’t see them where they are.

Each year, the state receives dozens of reports of sightings. But only a handful are verified, and none in the urban sprawl of Dallas and Fort Worth.

A taxidermist in Glen Rose mounted this mountain lion that Wesley Monk shot and killed in October 2014 while deer hunting in Somervell County, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth. A game warden said at the time that it was the first mountain lion killed in the area in a dozen years. (Steve Leech)

Yet mountain lions do exist in Texas, and they wander far and wide. But do they venture as far north as North Texas, creeping up the riverbeds, prowling for wild hogs and deer?

The answer is that no one seems to really know. Perhaps there is a mountain lion here. And perhaps there isn’t.

Nevertheless, the descriptions and witness reports keep coming and describe an otherworldly being: a spectral creature, eyes glowing, gliding through the night.

There is a deep and almost primal interest in the mountain lion that seems to drive us to want to see it, even when it isn’t there. “It’s a rare and mythical creature that’s fascinating to people,” said Jonah Evans, state mammalogist for Texas Parks & Wildlife, who collects data on mountain lions for the state.

When people do see them, the experience is usually lightning-fast and unforgettable.

In April, in Pescadero, Calif., a woman described how “the shadow of an animal” crept through an open door into her bedroom, snatched her dog from the foot of the bed and disappeared into the darkness. DNA testing of saliva mixed in the dog's blood would confirm the shadow was a mountain lion.

But in this part of the world, the mountain lion is more myth than reality.

Hundreds of sightings

Since 2011, more than 250 mountain lion sightings have been reported to the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department from all over the state. Most could not be confirmed and only a fraction verified, Evans said.

In a typical case, Evans will get a call or email from someone saying he's seen a mountain lion. Even if the person happens to include photographic evidence, “it’s usually a house cat or bobcat.”

The strange thing to Evans is that many of the sightings of mountain lions come from big metropolitan areas, places where you’d least expect to see one of the most reclusive of animals in Texas.

“If we looked at a map that showed all the sighting reports for the state, it would look like there was a large population of mountain lions in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston,” Evans said.

“Either there are large numbers of these creatures roaming around that have eluded biologists for a number of years,” Evans said, “or there’s something else going on.”

That something else is usually a confirmation bias. “Someone in a neighborhood will say they saw a mountain lion, and the next thing you know, we’ve got a bunch of reports,” he said.

But there could be another, less scientific, reason: the call of the wild.

The mountain lion is a reminder that even in the wealthiest nation on Earth, with its predictability, material comforts and technological marvels, we aren’t so far removed from the primitive ethos of “eat or be eaten.”

“There is something that people find fascinating about mountain lions. There’s some weird psychology at work,” said Chris Jackson, a longtime amateur naturalist from Carrollton.

Jackson loves the idea of mountain lions, so much so that he tracks sightings in a popular website he created called DFW Urban Wildlife.

He knows, as well as anyone, how deeply people’s interest in the animal runs.

“People really want to say they’ve seen a mountain lion,” he said.

Real or imagined?

In the black-and-white image, the wild cat is prowling, peering over a steep bank that rises from a creek bed.

Jackson stared at the cat, absorbing every detail of the photo emailed to his blog. Was it really what the reader insisted it was: the reclusive mountain lion?

Or was it just his lying eyes?

A 2015 photo from a game camera required an on-site visit from urban wildlife expert Chris Jackson to conclude whether it shows a mountain lion or a bobcat. (David Walker / DFWUrbanWildlife.com)

This cat wasn’t seen somewhere along a rocky ridge in Southwest Texas, where you’d expect to find mountain lions. The photo was taken along a greenbelt park in Garland.

If Jackson could confirm the sighting, he knew it would create a stir locally unlike any other animal.

From the time Jackson created his website 12 years ago, he noticed the powerful draw mountain lions have on our imagination. Now 49, and a software engineer by day, Jackson has spent the intervening years observing, photographing and writing about wildlife in one of the most densely populated regions in the country.

Five years ago, he posted an image of a mountain lion with the plea: “If you see one of these ANYWHERE in North Texas please report it to me.”

Reports rolled in; most lacked verifiable information or amounted to secondhand information heard from a neighbor. Or the animal in question was obviously a bobcat or house cat.

Two years ago, he noted he’d been getting “an unusual number” of mountain lion sightings from around the Dallas area. He had to balance his excitement with the skepticism of someone steeped in an engineer’s methodical and analytical approach to new information.

Bottom line: He knew that a mountain lion in North Texas would be an extremely rare occurrence but not outside the realm of possibility.

Big cat’s habitat

Though they once roamed all over Texas, mountain lions are now found mostly in South and West Texas. There are also pockets of the Panhandle, Hill Country and East Texas where Texas wildlife officials have confirmed sightings.

Bobcats, meanwhile, are plentiful in North Texas and elsewhere across the state. Much smaller than mountain lions, bobcats typically weigh between 15 and 30 pounds, stand about 17 to 23 inches tall and 25 to 40 inches long, between the size of a tennis racket and a baseball bat. Their most distinguishing feature is their short tail, for which bobcats are named.

In comparison, mountain lions are normally between 120 and 150 pounds or more. They stand about three feet tall and average 5 to 6 feet in length, around the size of the deer they like to stalk. And unlike the bobcat, the mountain lion’s tail can be a snake-like 2 feet long or more.

The photo of the wild cat in Garland was sent by a resident who’d seen Jackson’s blog posts. At first glance, the cat in the photo certainly looked like a mountain lion, Jackson said, pulling up the photo on his laptop at a Starbucks recently.

The posture was generally correct for a mountain lion. The face didn’t have the bobcat’s distinctive cheek ruffs, and he didn’t see the bobcat’s spots on the fur. The tail was obscured so Jackson couldn’t see how long it was. And he couldn’t accurately estimate the height or length of the cat without seeing the height of the grass or the width of the tree trunk in the photo.

Jackson decided to get a closer look at the scene. Once he got to the greenbelt park, he saw right away that the tree in the photo was much smaller than it had appeared, about the circumference of a coffee can. The grass, which came up to the cat’s shoulders in the photo, was a little over a foot tall. As for the lack of spots, the trail camera’s slow shutter speed probably wiped them out on the photo.

“Not only was this a bobcat,” Jackson said, “but it was a relatively small one.”

That story repeats itself all over North Texas. Just about every mountain lion sighting is actually a bobcat that people have enlarged in their imaginations

That was almost surely the case at Brookhaven College, where animal tracks found in the area proved to be consistent with those of a bobcat.

And in Cleburne, Texas wardens determined that the horse was not mauled by a mountain lion but got tangled up in barbed wire and thrashed itself to death.

Separating fact from fiction

It's a chupacabra!

No, it’s a coyote with mange.

That, in summary, was an exchange that took place two years ago after several friends found a dead animal on a farm between Austin and College Station.

Chupacabra, meaning "goat sucker" in Spanish, is the name of a legendary vampire-type creature that drinks the blood of goats. Reports of sightings originated in Puerto Rico in the 1990s and started in Texas about 2004, Evans said.

Phylis Canion held the head of what she called a chupacabra at her home in Cuero, Texas, in 2007. She found the strange-looking animal dead outside her ranch and believed it was responsible for killing many of her chickens. But biologists at Texas State University who tested the creature's DNA found that it was not the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra but just a plain old coyote. (File Photo / The Associated Press)

Its existence has never been verified. That doesn't stop people from wanting to believe in the chupacabra.

When Evans, the state mammalogist, is asked to speak to groups, one of his most popular presentations is called "Rare, Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Texas," starring chupacabras, black panthers and, yes, mountain lions.

What makes a creature mysterious and mythical? It’s rarely seen; it’s potentially dangerous; and there are an abundance of stories and folklore surrounding them, Evans said.

The lesson he tries to leave with audiences is simple: Be skeptical. Be especially critical of what you see and hear. Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable type of evidence.

As a longtime wildlife enthusiast, Jackson is neither scientist nor rank amateur. But he wrestles with issues such as confirmation bias and optical illusion all the time.

After years of trekking around lakes, woods and parks, Jackson has seen all kinds of wild animals. He’s currently on the hunt for ringtails, an extremely reclusive animal also known as a miner’s cat.

Rare and unexpected

“Anything rare and unexpected is exciting,” he said recently, while on a walk through Arlington’s old Village Creek Drying Beds. Part of a wastewater treatment plant, the area is known as a hot spot for finding migratory birds as well as bobcats and feral hogs.

Chris Jackson looks for wildlife at the Village Creek Drying Beds in Arlington. The old wastewater treatment facility has been overtaken by foliage and wildlife, and it's a popular bird spotting location. (Ryan Michalesko / Staff Photographer)

On a recent drizzly morning, he left his camera behind and carried only a pair of binoculars. During a two-hour hike along the berm of the drying beds, he spotted a raccoon thrashing in tall grass under the watchful gaze of a cooper hawk perched statue-like on a tree limb. He spied several ibises, identifiable by their black-tipped wings as they flew overhead. And down on the ground, he pointed out a black-bellied whistling duck floating near a black-necked stilt, easily recognized by its long, pink legs and thin, black bill.

Not bad for a Saturday in early July. But has he given up hope of seeing a mountain lion?

“I will admit that I’m a little more cynical about it now than I was when I started out,” he said. “I’ve been working for years to tamp down the rumors. But I absolutely haven’t given up hope.”

He can easily imagine a scenario in which a transient mountain lion, a young male, moves out of West Texas in search of a mate and makes his way to North Texas, following prey down the Trinity River and into the metro area.

“What we do have in the metroplex is an abundance of the mountain lions’ favorite game, which are deer and feral hogs,” living in the Trinity River bottoms, he said.

Texas wildlife officials have also received a dozen or so reports of sightings from around North Texas since 2011. Most are probably false alarms, said officials with Texas Parks & Wildlife, which sends wardens out to check up on reports of mountain lions only when people or livestock are threatened, such as the report of the horse mauling in Cleburne a few months ago.

They were able to confirm one sighting on the edge of North Texas. On Oct. 23, 2014, a trail camera snapped a photo of what was unmistakably a male mountain lion in Somervell County, southwest of Fort Worth and near Glen Rose.

Hunter vs. mountain lion

Seven weeks later, on a misty December morning, Wes Monk, 35, a mechanic who lives an hour’s drive from Fort Worth, was hunting deer on private property near Glen Rose. Suddenly, he noticed a disturbance coming from the trees. “The crows were going crazy,” he said.

When he went to record the birds on video, his attention was drawn to something by the deer stand. That’s when he saw it. “Good Lord, have mercy,” he said to himself. “That’s a mountain lion!”

Monk stared at the animal in shock. He decided if he didn’t shoot it, nobody would believe him. “I’d just be another story of someone who got a glimpse of one,” Monk said.

Wesley Monk (left) shot a mountain lion while deer hunting in Somervell County, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, in October 2014. With him was Steve Leech, a taxidermist with Hoof and Horn Taxidermy of Glen Rose. (Steve Leech)

With a single shot from his .243 rifle, he felled the cat. It weighed a little over 100 pounds and was about 5 feet long. A local taxidermist, Steve Leech, mounted the animal. He refused to believe Monk had shot a mountain lion until the hunter texted him the photo. In Leech’s experience, too many people had called a bobcat a mountain lion.

In Texas, mountain lions aren’t protected and can be killed anytime or anywhere it’s legal to discharge a firearm, Jackson said. But even though it was legal, Jackson couldn’t disguise his disappointment over the outcome.

“This one guy got to decide for the rest of us whether we got to have a mountain lion here in the area or not,” he said.

Monk said he respected the views of conservationists. “It would be nice to see mountain lions whenever you go out in the woods,” he said.

Monk still hunts. He plans to be out again this deer season. And he believes somewhere in those same woods and hills, there’s another mountain lion roaming.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said. “Not a doubt at all.”