Gotcha: Trailcam footage of cougar ends years of mystery
Jim Moodie, QMI Agency
First posted: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 09:40 AM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 09:52 AM EDT
SUDBURY, Ont. — After years of reported sightings and speculation — not to mention a longstanding reward from the local paper for photographic proof — an image of a cougar has finally been captured on Lake Huron’s Manitoulin Island.
In early July, Michigan resident Chris Wenz set up seven trail cameras at his property south of Gore Bay expecting to encounter the usual menagerie of deer, bears, foxes and raccoons when he reviewed the footage.
But one brief clip showed something a bit more unusual: a large, tawny beast with a rope-like appendage, tipped in black, slinking away into the forest.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Wenz said Tuesday, speaking from his home in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich. “The tail was too long to be a bobcat or lynx, and too skinny-looking to be the tail of a wolf or coyote.”
The Ford Motor Company engineer and avid deer hunter consulted with his Manitoulin neighbour Georges Prevost. “He said for sure that’s a cougar,” Wenz said.
So, in effect, has Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources.
Rick Rosatte, a cougar expert with the MNR, reviewed the video and deemed the animal to be “consistent with a cougar,” ministry spokeswoman Karen Passmore said.
Wenz originally contacted The Manitoulin Expositor, which has reported on cougar sightings extensively and for years has been offering a $500 reward for photographic proof.
That prize will now go to Wenz, who described the money as “an added bonus for being lucky.”
He said he wasn’t actively trying to capture an image of the elusive animal, nor was he previously aware of the great push on Manitoulin to document the creature’s presence.
The MNR dispersed 40 trail cameras of its own in 2009 to try to record an image of a cougar. It set them up at locations where numerous sightings had been reported, but none of these heat- and motion-triggered devices captured a trace of the enigmatic beast.
The species is native to Ontario but was all but wiped out over a century ago because of hunting and habitat intrusion.
Gotcha: Trailcam footage of cougar ends years of mystery | Ontario | News | Toro
Cougar Town exists, and it's here in Ontario
By Mike Strobel ,Toronto Sun
First posted: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 03:01 PM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 03:27 PM EDT
KAGAWONG - They’ll have to rename this place Cougar Town.
By cougar, of course, I mean the long, slinky variety with pearly teeth and twitching tail. I mean the kind on four legs.
Please get that straight. Last thing we need up here is hordes of misinformed young studs from Toronto with mommy issues beating the bushes and scaring the rabbits.
Yes, gentle reader, the cat came back, the real deal — 130 years after the presumed last of its kind in the province was gunned down near Creemore.
A camera has finally captured a genuine wild Ontario cougar, haunting the mystical woods of Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron.
News broke Wednesday on the front page of the weekly Expositor, which in 2009 posted a $500 reward for photographic proof after a flurry of sightings.
The Expositor is a tiny journalistic gem which covers euchre scores but also once beat the Globe and Mail for a Michener Award for investigative reporting.
Best $500 they ever spent was that reward. The fur flew. Many of the island’s 12,000 humans and quite a few of its deer reported seeing cougars.
One turned out to be a large and lost pet cat named Rusty. Others were bobcats, lynx or indistinct specks in a photo. I even found tracks on my North Channel shoreline last summer I was sure were a cougar’s, but they might have been a blonde’s.
The Government Road near Providence Bay is practically a cougar convention — so many sightings the locals call it Cougar Corridor. But no clear photo. No proof. Until now.
Chris Wenz, 56, a Ford engineer from Detroit, has motion sensor trail cameras on his 120-acre summer spread south of Gore Bay. For a decade he has collected photos or videos of bears, coyotes, deer, porcupines, dogs, cats ...
... and in the wee hours of July 3, a cougar. (See the video for yourself at torontosun.com/cougar.)
The quality is hardly Spielberg, or even the Cat in the Hat, but focus on the lower left. Voila! It is Ontario’s most elusive and formerly extinct furball. Puma concolor couguar.
“I knew right off the bat,” Wenz tells me down the line from Motor City. “The tail is the thing. It means it can’t be a bobcat or lynx.
“I thought, wow. I feel really lucky that animal walked across my land. And it’s exciting to solve the mystery.”
So Wenz is $500 richer, or $400 and change US.
The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) says the cat’s for real. Spokesman Karen Passmore emails me: “Confirmation was based on the shape of the animal’s body but mostly due to the length, size and black at the end of the tail — there is no other animal in the woods with a tail like this other than a cougar.”
Certain Toronto bars on the other hand ...
Passmore says MNR technicians will visit the camera site this week, though cougars can prowl 50 km a day and this one could be in Timbuktu by now.
Wenz’s land is perfect cougar terrain — Balsam fir and mixed brush “thicker than the hair on a dog’s back,” longtime trapper Steve Hall, 89, tells me.
But the whole island is cougar friendly, including a deer buffet. You trip over whitetail deer here.
Hall, whose family sold Wenz his retreat, says he’s never spied a cougar in his decades outdoors but has found cat prints five inches wide that could belong to nothing else.
“Oh, they’re here, alright,” says Hall, who will hunt deer this fall but has retired his traplines.
“Aww, when you’re 90 years old you don’t even buy green bananas anymore.”
Hall joined Expositor editor Alicia McCutcheon and her mom at the site this week. Believe it or not they found hairballs, the bane of every cat lover, which the MNR will test.
Cougarmania has gripped Manitoulin since a big cat was spotted in 2009 at M’Chigeeng, an Ojibway reserve down the shore from my cabin.
A priest saw it near his church. Young mom Rachel Panamick told me then how the tawny beast sniffed at the remains of her whitefish dinner and confronted her husky-cross, Coda, before melting into the deep woods.
But no photos, though you’d think the MNR would take the word of the priest, for God’s sake.
Anyway, the cat is now out of the bag.
“In a way, it’s bittersweet,” says McCutcheon, 32, of the end of her great cougar photo derby. “The whole island was caught up. It was something people could really sink their teeth into.”
But no cat gives up all its secrets easily. Questions remain: How many are there? Is it a true “extinct” Eastern Cougar, a slightly smaller version of the western mountain lion, or a genetic combination of both?
Whatever, it was photographed less than 15 km, as the crow flies, from my cabin.
Night trips to my outhouse just got a lot more interesting.
Strobel’s column usually runs Monday to Thursday, but is currently lost in the woods
Cougar Town exists, and it's here in Ontario | STROBEL | Ontario | News | Toront
Jim Moodie, QMI Agency
First posted: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 09:40 AM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 09:52 AM EDT
SUDBURY, Ont. — After years of reported sightings and speculation — not to mention a longstanding reward from the local paper for photographic proof — an image of a cougar has finally been captured on Lake Huron’s Manitoulin Island.
In early July, Michigan resident Chris Wenz set up seven trail cameras at his property south of Gore Bay expecting to encounter the usual menagerie of deer, bears, foxes and raccoons when he reviewed the footage.
But one brief clip showed something a bit more unusual: a large, tawny beast with a rope-like appendage, tipped in black, slinking away into the forest.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Wenz said Tuesday, speaking from his home in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich. “The tail was too long to be a bobcat or lynx, and too skinny-looking to be the tail of a wolf or coyote.”
The Ford Motor Company engineer and avid deer hunter consulted with his Manitoulin neighbour Georges Prevost. “He said for sure that’s a cougar,” Wenz said.
So, in effect, has Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources.
Rick Rosatte, a cougar expert with the MNR, reviewed the video and deemed the animal to be “consistent with a cougar,” ministry spokeswoman Karen Passmore said.
Wenz originally contacted The Manitoulin Expositor, which has reported on cougar sightings extensively and for years has been offering a $500 reward for photographic proof.
That prize will now go to Wenz, who described the money as “an added bonus for being lucky.”
He said he wasn’t actively trying to capture an image of the elusive animal, nor was he previously aware of the great push on Manitoulin to document the creature’s presence.
The MNR dispersed 40 trail cameras of its own in 2009 to try to record an image of a cougar. It set them up at locations where numerous sightings had been reported, but none of these heat- and motion-triggered devices captured a trace of the enigmatic beast.
The species is native to Ontario but was all but wiped out over a century ago because of hunting and habitat intrusion.
Gotcha: Trailcam footage of cougar ends years of mystery | Ontario | News | Toro
Cougar Town exists, and it's here in Ontario
By Mike Strobel ,Toronto Sun
First posted: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 03:01 PM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 03:27 PM EDT
KAGAWONG - They’ll have to rename this place Cougar Town.
By cougar, of course, I mean the long, slinky variety with pearly teeth and twitching tail. I mean the kind on four legs.
Please get that straight. Last thing we need up here is hordes of misinformed young studs from Toronto with mommy issues beating the bushes and scaring the rabbits.
Yes, gentle reader, the cat came back, the real deal — 130 years after the presumed last of its kind in the province was gunned down near Creemore.
A camera has finally captured a genuine wild Ontario cougar, haunting the mystical woods of Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron.
News broke Wednesday on the front page of the weekly Expositor, which in 2009 posted a $500 reward for photographic proof after a flurry of sightings.
The Expositor is a tiny journalistic gem which covers euchre scores but also once beat the Globe and Mail for a Michener Award for investigative reporting.
Best $500 they ever spent was that reward. The fur flew. Many of the island’s 12,000 humans and quite a few of its deer reported seeing cougars.
One turned out to be a large and lost pet cat named Rusty. Others were bobcats, lynx or indistinct specks in a photo. I even found tracks on my North Channel shoreline last summer I was sure were a cougar’s, but they might have been a blonde’s.
The Government Road near Providence Bay is practically a cougar convention — so many sightings the locals call it Cougar Corridor. But no clear photo. No proof. Until now.
Chris Wenz, 56, a Ford engineer from Detroit, has motion sensor trail cameras on his 120-acre summer spread south of Gore Bay. For a decade he has collected photos or videos of bears, coyotes, deer, porcupines, dogs, cats ...
... and in the wee hours of July 3, a cougar. (See the video for yourself at torontosun.com/cougar.)
The quality is hardly Spielberg, or even the Cat in the Hat, but focus on the lower left. Voila! It is Ontario’s most elusive and formerly extinct furball. Puma concolor couguar.
“I knew right off the bat,” Wenz tells me down the line from Motor City. “The tail is the thing. It means it can’t be a bobcat or lynx.
“I thought, wow. I feel really lucky that animal walked across my land. And it’s exciting to solve the mystery.”
So Wenz is $500 richer, or $400 and change US.
The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) says the cat’s for real. Spokesman Karen Passmore emails me: “Confirmation was based on the shape of the animal’s body but mostly due to the length, size and black at the end of the tail — there is no other animal in the woods with a tail like this other than a cougar.”
Certain Toronto bars on the other hand ...
Passmore says MNR technicians will visit the camera site this week, though cougars can prowl 50 km a day and this one could be in Timbuktu by now.
Wenz’s land is perfect cougar terrain — Balsam fir and mixed brush “thicker than the hair on a dog’s back,” longtime trapper Steve Hall, 89, tells me.
But the whole island is cougar friendly, including a deer buffet. You trip over whitetail deer here.
Hall, whose family sold Wenz his retreat, says he’s never spied a cougar in his decades outdoors but has found cat prints five inches wide that could belong to nothing else.
“Oh, they’re here, alright,” says Hall, who will hunt deer this fall but has retired his traplines.
“Aww, when you’re 90 years old you don’t even buy green bananas anymore.”
Hall joined Expositor editor Alicia McCutcheon and her mom at the site this week. Believe it or not they found hairballs, the bane of every cat lover, which the MNR will test.
Cougarmania has gripped Manitoulin since a big cat was spotted in 2009 at M’Chigeeng, an Ojibway reserve down the shore from my cabin.
A priest saw it near his church. Young mom Rachel Panamick told me then how the tawny beast sniffed at the remains of her whitefish dinner and confronted her husky-cross, Coda, before melting into the deep woods.
But no photos, though you’d think the MNR would take the word of the priest, for God’s sake.
Anyway, the cat is now out of the bag.
“In a way, it’s bittersweet,” says McCutcheon, 32, of the end of her great cougar photo derby. “The whole island was caught up. It was something people could really sink their teeth into.”
But no cat gives up all its secrets easily. Questions remain: How many are there? Is it a true “extinct” Eastern Cougar, a slightly smaller version of the western mountain lion, or a genetic combination of both?
Whatever, it was photographed less than 15 km, as the crow flies, from my cabin.
Night trips to my outhouse just got a lot more interesting.
Strobel’s column usually runs Monday to Thursday, but is currently lost in the woods
Cougar Town exists, and it's here in Ontario | STROBEL | Ontario | News | Toront