Stephen Bailey, 25 of Jefferson, believes he captured an image of a mountain lion with his game camera on Oct.13 in one of his favorite hunting spots in Jefferson.
Last year he captured several images of deer in the area, and harvested “a decent eight point buck.” A 15-year veteran hunter, Bailey said he “hasn’t seen a deer yet (this year). Not a single one.”
Bailey thought it was kind of funny that he did not capture any images of deer in the same area in over a month this year. His camera took a picture of a coyote and he figured that was the problem, until he looked at a second image. At first he thought the second image was another coyote.
“It’s tail was touching the ground,” he said. “I looked closer and it was five to six feet long with a great big tail on it. I’m almost positive it’s a mountain lion. In one picture you can see a front leg and paw and the second the rear quarter and tail. I’ve showed it to all my friends and co-workers (at Masters Machine) and they all think it’s a mountain lion.” Bailey said.
Bailey went back out to the area where the game camera was stationed and paced off the length of the giant cat. “It was a good four to five feet plus the length of its tail. I’d like to have a wildlife biologist look at it,” Bailey added of his pictures.
After the Nov. 11 edition of The Lincoln County News finished its press run, Keel Kemper, wildlife biologist for the Maine Dept. of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife reached LCN with his comments:
According to Kemper: “This is clearly a whitetail deer. Several observations: I assume it is the long tail that has Mr. Bailey convinced. However, if this were a cougar it would be a cougar with a cut off or much reduced in length tail. Also the diameter of this tail is way too small to be a cougar. A cougar tail should extend almost to the ground and then arc up again. A cougar carries his/her tail in such a fashion that it might have the appearance of a question mark. This tail doesn’t even make it to the ground.
“Notice the clear white underneath tail of a whitetail deer, that really shows up on the camera. This tail appears to blend into perhaps a stick or vegetation that makes this tail appear longer than it actually is.
“The most definitive mark to me is the left rear leg which is clearly a deer hock characterized by the severe angle of the deer’s ‘knee.’
“Mr. Bailey should find some solace in the fact that it is the whitetail deer that is most often confused with a cougar and this photo is very illustrative of just that reality.”
According to the IF&W website, the state officially recognizes bobcats and lynx as Maine’s only resident big cats.
According to the same source, there are hundreds of reports of mountain lion sightings annually and several tracks have been discovered that “could be in the range of a small mountain lion or a large bobcat.”
To date, however there are only two scientifically confirmed sightings in Maine, one in 1938 near the Maine-Quebec border and one in 1995 in Cape Elizabeth.
According to media reports, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially considers the mountain lion extinct in the Eastern United States, although they still enjoy protected status.
Eastern Mountain Lions once roamed from Canada to Florida but were wiped out by extensive hunting by the late 1800s.
