The Greenwich to Milford Mountain Lion

In March 2011, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct. Sightings in the Northeast kept coming anyway. Almost none could be confirmed. Three months later, one was.

Sunday evening, June 5, 2011. Brunswick School, on King Street in the northwest corner of Greenwich known as the backcountry. The campus sits beside Westchester County Airport. King Street runs along the New York border. Faculty members reported a mountain lion. A blurry photograph was taken. Joseph Cassone, the town's conservation assistant, saw what mattered in it. A long, straight tail. Bobcats have short tails, he noted. Mountain lions have long ones, about half the length of the body.

Then the traces. Paw prints four inches wide. A 9-inch dropping. A scat sample collected on campus that same day. Greenwich police counted at least three sightings in a week.

Thursday, June 9. Shortly before 5 p.m., the Department of Environmental Protection confirmed it. The animal was a mountain lion. Deputy Commissioner Susan Frechette pointed to the hazy photographs and the size of the prints. DEP believed it "may very likely be a mountain lion that has been held in captivity." Officials checked two legally permitted captive lions in New York near Greenwich.

Saturday, June 11. About 12:40 a.m. Route 15, the Wilbur Cross Parkway, northbound near Exit 55 in Milford. About 40 miles from Greenwich. A 2006 Hyundai Tucson struck the cat. The driver was unhurt. The animal was pronounced dead at the scene. A lean, 140-pound young male.

Greenwich did not settle. Residents reported a big cat perched on a golf course wall, traipsing down a parkway, chased by dogs. A John Street family said one scaled a 25-foot wall into Audubon Greenwich. Audubon closed its trails. DEP spokesman Dennis Schain said there was "no evidence found at either site." The Audubon scat came back canine.

The carcass went to a DEP facility. Tissue went to the US Forest Service lab in Missoula. On July 26, 2011, the answer came. The DNA matched the Black Hills population of South Dakota. It also matched samples from one site in Minnesota and three in Wisconsin, and hair from a bedding site in Lake George, New York. There, in December 2010, the wife of DEC Col. Dave Eggleston had watched the cat pass through her backyard while washing dishes. It was wild, not an escaped captive. "It's quite an anomaly that it traveled this far," said Frechette.

In 2016, Jason Hawley and colleagues described the case in the Journal of Mammalogy. Isotope analysis and physical inspection showed no sign of captivity. The straight-line distance was more than 2,450 km, the longest cougar dispersal on record. The likely route ran more than 2,700 km over about two years. The authors suggested it kept moving because it found no females, and argued the case supports the view that there is no breeding population in the East.

Mark Dowling of the Cougar Network said people confuse bobcats, coyotes and dogs with lions. Alan Rabinowitz of Panthera kept the door open: "There's a possibility that they are surviving in small numbers in the wooded areas of the Northeast." Mark McCollough of USFWS answered, "The evidence is not there." In 2022, Hawley said "lack of evidence is very good evidence." In Greenwich, for once, the evidence was there. A photograph, a set of prints, a body, and a trail of DNA back to South Dakota.