Black panther sightings truth or illusions

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
March 14, 2003
It was early morning as I drove east toward my mother-in-law's house in Smith County and slowed down to enter her graveled driveway. The distraction of the event that was about to happen dims my recollection of where I had been or what season of the year it was, but the time was shortly after sunup and the year was in the mid-1990s.
As I braked to turn left into the driveway, I scanned the blacktop road ahead for oncoming traffic because I had to cross the left lane to enter the driveway. Something caught my eye. A large black cat entered the road from the right just 40 yards ahead, exiting a field and heading straight for a pond which lay just across the road.
The cat was many times larger than the world's largest house cat and had a very long tail that curled upward at the end. It moved quickly to the center of the pavement where it froze in place and looked at me, its crossing toward the pond obviously interrupted by the noise and sight of my vehicle.
It glared at me for the count of two before it wheeled and streaked back into the field. Its gait could be described as a crouching run, identical to that common with cats that have decided that they need to be somewhere else very quickly a darting run with legs moving in a blur as opposed to the bounding stride of a hurried canine. All its movements were catlike.
My reaction took another two seconds and I steered the vehicle back into the right lane and floored the gas pedal. I wanted to get to the cat's crossing spot to see if I could see it retreating across the field. I sped to the side of the road, pulled over, dashed to the field fence and peered across the field. No cat. It had made the 200 yard run across the field very rapidly.
As I pulled into the driveway, I realized I had just seen a cougar. This was exciting enough, but what bowled me over was that it was black! Black cougars are rare but they do exist. I immediately questioned what I had seen. But on a scale running from poor to excellent, the early morning light was very good. The sun was up and I was looking east, but there is a hill beyond where the cat had been and there are tall trees that blocked direct sunlight, so there was no glare. I know what I saw.
Tales doubted
For years the stories of infrequent sightings of black panthers (cougars, pumas, mountain lions, catamounts are all the same animal) were discredited by wildlife biologists, who by the way know a lot more about our wildlife that most of the rest of us. I sided with these experts long ago and always chuckled inside at the tellers of these stories while listening with interest but also with concealed amusement.
So I felt a little strange as I told my story to Art Bradshaw, Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks manager of Caney Creek Wildlife Management Area, the boundary of which lies just yards from where I saw the cougar. As Art listened, I tried to read his eyes to discern hidden skepticism. Instead his reply surprised me. He told me that the wife of one of his workers had seen a cat like I described cross the same road farther east just days before. Her account of the cat's actions matched mine.
So that Art won't get crossways with his biologist friends, he never said he believed the cat to be a cougar.
Dolly Turner was driving home one evening at dusk, the surroundings dark enough that headlights were necessary. As she neared her home west of Suqualena, a large, black cat appeared in the road just ahead, so close that she had to stop the car. "It was solid black with a long, black tail and its eyes glowed greenish red." she reports. "It was long, real long," she said, "and it had a big face and head. It was as big as a German shepherd." The cat glared at the car and then made one long leap from the road onto a low bank and into the woods.
Typical cougar
A highway construction crew spotted a typical "brown" cougar east of Meridian some years ago. It is almost certain that these infrequent sightings are of roaming cougars that originate in Florida. The mountain lion is known to travel great distances for various reasons searches for mates, prey animals, a territory it can mark for its own, etc.
Most wildlife biologists have trouble believing stories involving black cougars because so few of the animals in a population are black. They understand that many of the regularly reported sightings are actually of big dogs like black retrievers or house cats that just look big or coyotes. They also know that if a cougar is actually spotted, it may be in poor light and thus appear to be black. So reports of black cougars are routinely discounted.
But I have a question about panthers that show up in our area and other states north of Florida being so often reported as black. Many animal species are prejudicial toward one of their kind that is different due to deformity, color or other differences. Who is to say that the few black panthers that crop up in Florida are not "run out of town" so to speak being victims of exaggerated natural territorial battles? Are the males born black in color also smaller physically, the result of genes that parallel their color genes, thus rendering them unable to compete with big, brownish males? Do some of these banished males strike out on their own and end up in our woodlands?
I don't know. What I saw was no 200 pounder, but it was no canine and it was no house cat!