It's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that mountain lions could have survived
undetected in New England. Bobcats-- admittedly much smaller creatures than mountain
lions--are known to exist in considerable numbers and yet are so shy and furtive that you
would never guess their existence. Many forest rangers go whole careers without seeing
one. And there is certainly ample room in the eastern woods for large cats to roam
undisturbed. Massachusetts alone has 250,000 acres of woodland, 100,000 of it in the
comely Berkshires. From where I was now, I could, given the will and a more or less
infinite supply of noodles, walk all the way to Cape Chidley in northern Quebec, 1,800
miles away on the icy Labrador Sea, and scarcely ever have to leave the cover of trees.
Even so, it is unlikely that a large cat could survive in sufficient numbers to breed not just
in one area but evidently all over New England and escape notice for nine decades. Still,
there was that scat. Whatever it was, it excreted like a mountain lion.
The most plausible explanation was that any lions out there--if lions they were--were
released pets, bought in haste and later regretted. It would be just my luck, of course, to
be savaged by an animal with a flea collar and a medical history. I imagined lying on my
back, being extravagantly ravaged, inclining my head slightly to read a dangling silver tag
that said: "My name is Mr. Bojangles. If found please call Tanya and Vinny at 924-4667."
Like most large animals (and a good many small ones), the eastern mountain lion was
wiped out because it was deemed to be a nuisance. Until the 1940s, many eastern states
had well-publicized "varmint campaigns," often run by state conservation departments,
that awarded points to hunters for every predatory creature they killed, which was just
about every creature there was--hawks, owls, kingfishers, eagles, and virtually any type of
large mammal. West Virginia gave an annual college scholarship to the student who killed
the most animals; other states freely distributed bounties and other cash rewards.
Rationality didn't often come into it. Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties
for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than
whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl
carries off a cow.)
As late as 1890, New York State paid bounties on 107 mountain lions, but within a
decade they were virtually all gone. (The very last wild eastern mountain lion was killed in
the Smokies in the 1920s.) The timberwolf and woodland caribou also disappeared from
their last Appalachian fastnesses in the first years of this century, and the black bear very
nearly followed them. In 1900, the bear population of New Hampshire--now over 3,000--
had fallen to just fifty.
There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a
wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical
ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals--
220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30
foxes, and 5 black bears.
The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking
losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild
were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the
first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons--
more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of
existence--the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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