Published: 7/24/2016 10:59:20 PM
A Barnstead woman said she and her neighbors have recently spotted a mountain lion roaming their yards, a claim that challenges the conventional wisdom of local wildlife officials.
Naomi Avery said she’s spotted the bright-orange cat – with a long tail and a body the size of a large dog – twice in the past month. The Hartshorn Road resident said she also heard its loud growl, directed at her house cat, Muffin, from about 50 feet away.
“I knew my little cat couldn’t do that,” she said. “Her eyes were as big as bottle caps.”
Avery, who said she’s lived in Barnstead for 35 years, has seen what she believes is the same mountain lion each of the past three summers, she said. She’s become familiar enough with it to give it a name: Samson.
She said her next-door neighbors know the mountain lion, too, and they’ve been out counting their chickens recently to make sure no one is amiss.
Nevertheless, when she made a call to the Fish and Game Department, she said they were “totally disinterested” unless she could produce photographic evidence.
That’s probably because reports of mountain lion sightings are rarely born out by physical evidence. Fish and Game didn’t immediately respond to a phone call Wednesday afternoon.
As noted in the New Hampshire Wildlife Journal’s November/December edition last year, Fish and Game recorded 400 reported sightings between 2005 and 2014.
“To date,” biologist Patrick Tate was quoted as saying, “none of these reports have included the physical evidence necessary to confirm the species as a mountain lion. In fact, only a few of the 400 have included any physical evidence. All proved to be something other than a mountain lion, typically a bobcat or coyote.”
Avery isn’t ready to buck that trend, because she hasn’t taken any photos of Samson. But she said her granddaughter’s husband plans to set up a trail camera in her yard soon to gather better evidence.
“I don’t think Fish and Game would believe it even then,” Avery said. “I don’t know why, but they won’t admit there’s mountain lions around here.”
Avery wrote a letter in the Suncook Valley Sun recently, asking if anyone else had seen what she’s seen. She said she got one call back so far from a fellow Barnstead resident who raised a bed of catnip four years ago.
The man told her that “the mountain lion loved it. He came out and ate (the catnip) and he also ate his cat.”
Her cat, Muffin, seems to be worried she’ll suffer the same fate after her face-to-face encounter, she said.
“She didn’t ask to go out again that day, believe me,” Avery said. “Now whenever I let her out, I go out first and look all around.”
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)