Mountain lions in the Poconos

The Pocono Record has recently run two articles on the mountain lion in Pennsylvania here, and here.

The 1874 extinction date is a bit odd, as there's no less than 22 cougar kills after the Hawk Mountain (Berks) kill that year, placing the date at 1917 at the earliest.

Insert clever Oz-themed pun here

On the CFZ News blog, I found a link to this recent story:

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Authorities say a woman was killed by her pet black bear as she cleaned its cage.

State police say 37-year-old Kelly Ann Walz was mauled to death Sunday evening by the 350-pound (160-kilogram) bear.

The Morning Call newspaper reports that a state Game Commission spokesman says Walz kept the bear inside a steel and concrete cage near her house in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Officials say Walz threw some dog food to one side of the cage to distract the bear while she cleaned the other side. At some point the bear turned on her and attacked.

The bear was shot and killed. No information was available about who shot the bear.

Game officials say Walz also owned a Bengal tiger and an African lion and had licenses to own them.

Serves the stupid fool right for having a bear, lion, and tiger...

The Suscon Screamer

Pennsylvania has many urban legends which may be based upon cryptozoological phenomena. One of these is the legend of what is called the Suscon Screamer. The screaming thing is reputed to haunt the area around where the Susquehanna Railroad once crossed over Suscon Road south of Wilkes-Barre. The former bridge is also known among locals as the Boo-Boo Bridge or, more ominously, the Black Bridge.

Unearthly screams have been heard reverberating through the forests near the little town of Suscon for generations and some residents have even phoned the Pittston Township police to complain of the shrieks.

Some versions of the story, in traditional ghost story fashion, have it that a ghostly female haunts the area, whether it be a victim of a car crash, a love-crossed suicide, or one of the ubiquitous phantom hitch-hikers.

One of the more popular versions has it that the tiny town is haunted by a porcine swamp monster that emerged from one of the surrounding bogs. In the 1970s, the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader reported that a local hunter heard something tramping around through the trees. Through his binoculars, he saw something

...about 6' long with a long snout. It weighed about 200 pounds and was gray in color. It had webbed feet with long claws and had a huge head...the ground was clawed up as if 100 turkeys had gone through.

This sighting was actually investigated by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, although the hunter refused to take the investigators to the area due to fear of the monster. The hunter did, however, say that the creature he saw was neither bear nor coyote.

The Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society has recorded that in May of 1976, there was a sighting of a group of four 6' brown humanoids at one of the lakes south of Suscon. There were also sightings recorded from Harveyville, also in Luzerne County (1984), and also from Dickson City immediately north of Scranton, in neigboring Lackawanna County (2003).

Another popular version has it that the Screamer was actually a panther that escaped from a circus train; although the specific date of this supposed crash is unknown, older residents of Suscon still remembered it, at least as of 1995 (when Pocono Ghosts, Legends and Lore by Charles Adams III and David Seibold was published). If this identity of the Screamer were true, by this late date it would doubtless be the cat's restless phantom.

The Jacobs Photos - Bigfoot or bear?

In late 2007, the media was abuzz about a series of photographs taken by a stationary trail camera with an infrared flash set up by Rick Jacobs in northwestern Pennsylvania. The camera captured a few photos of what were clearly bear, followed by two images (one of these is above) which many feel show a Bigfoot in a hunched position. The creature in the photos was apparently about the size of an adult bear, although analysis of limb ratios was more in line with a primate identity.

The explanation offered by the Game Commission was that the photographs depicted a bear afflicted with mange (the BFRO website feature on the Jacobs Photos includes a photograph of a mangy bear).

Laying the Fisher cougar attack to rest

It's an older story, but just in case you missed it: the Eastern Cougar Foundation and other websites reported in late October, 2008 that the Pennsylvania Game Commission had released a report stating that the blood found on a knife that Samuel Fisher of Sadsbury Township, Lancaster County claimed to have used to fight off an attacking cougar was human. Fisher's supposed attack had taken place on October 9.

Pennsylvania's feral hogs

From The Daily Yonder (January 15, 2008):

The most controversial figures in Pennsylvania these days aren't running for president, but for their lives. Feral pigs have become a nuisance -- a hazard, some say -- in the Keystone State, rooting up the land, attacking deer and out-competing native animals for food. One major concern is that the wild pig population could threaten Pennsylvania's $271 million domestic hog industry by infecting farm animals. (No wild pigs in Pennsylvania have yet been found to carry disease.)

But put away your rifle, for now anyway. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in December that feral hogs are "protected mammals." And until the state's Game Commission can draft regulations on wild boar hunting, shooting a feral pig is illegal.

Ironically, Pennsylvania's scourge of "wild" hogs was introduced by people -- specifically, landowners who imported these animals to be hunted for sport on private property.

"We found it alarming, the amount of hunting preserves that are actually bringing these hogs into the state," Harris Glass, told Joe Gorden of Johnstown's Tribune-Democrat. Glass, Pennsylvania's director of wildlife services, said the problem pigs escaped (or were intentionally released) from 15 game farms across the state. "Some of them actually advertise that there is no fence," he said. "Each of the five counties where we have confirmed feral hogs do have shooting preserves in them."

Gorden explains that not only the importation of wild pigs for hunting but the act of hunting itself has exacerbated the problem. According to Glass, hunting disperses the feral hog herds. Initially state wildlife officials thought there were some 20-30 "pockets" of wild pigs in the state. But, "just in Cambria and Bedford counties, there were probably 200 hogs removed this past hunting season," Glass said. Larger hunting parties especially tend to drive the animals farther afield. "With that kind of pressure, they've moving up over the ridge and into the next valley," Glass explained. "They are intelligent animals. They will avoid people. They're able to continue breeding, so as they spread and go into new areas, their population keeps growing and it gets harder to get a handle on things."

Until the December court ruling, wild hogs were considered private property and killing them was unregulated. Christian Berg of the Allentown's Morning Call spells out details of the court case, initiated against the state in 2004 for failing to enforce game code regulations on a 1500-acre hunting preserve along the New York border. While hunters want to designate Sus scrofa as private property and the Supreme Court calls them "wildlife, " the Pennsylvania Invasive Species Council has another designation for them: "invasives." That's a lot of titles for anybody, especially an unwittingly imported hooved animal.

Pennsylvania isn't the only state troubled by wild pigs. Missouri's Conservation Department apparently recommends "shoot on sight." Kansas, taking another tack, has banned hunting wild pigs altogether. But in Florida and South Texas, Harris Glass notes, "there is a whole culture built around hog hunting. If we get to that point in Pennsylvania, we are just not going to be able to stop it."

The Pennsylvania Board of Game Commissioners is likely to discuss establishing a feral hog season at its next meeting, January 29.