A cougar sighting (almost) at Misery Bay in 1999
In March of 1999, my friend Steve Hall and I and some other people were walking in the snow down the Lakeshore Trail at Misery Bay Provincial Park. I think it was a winter field trip that Gerald Courtin of Laurentian University was giving for the Friends of Misery Bay. Anyway, the temperature was above freezing and the snow was heavy and melting, making the going kind of slow. Below the trailhead but before opening under the tall pines, we came upon a set of large, fairly fresh tracks going the same way we were heading. We stood looking for a minute at the tracks, and then Gerry said out loud what Steve and I had both been thinking: “That’s a cougar, isn’t it?”
I looked closely at the tracks. The toes were spread wide, making a print that was nearly round in shape, not oblong. What I mean is that the toes spread out like a fan, not with the two middle ones ahead of the others the way dog or wolf toes are arranged. Also, this animal had been heavy enough to sink a ways into the mushy snow, yet none of the tracks showed a toenail at all. It had to be a large cat because wolves and dogs can’t retract their toenails. There was no sign of a drag mark from the tail, but then the snow was heavy and the tail probably wouldn’t have weighed enough to make a dent.
I got out my camera and laid a ballpoint pen down next to the tracks to give a sense of scale. The tracks were almost as big as the pen (about 10 cm or 4 inches). I said to Steve, “If these pictures turn out, we’ll tell people about it. If they don’t, we’ll just forget it.” Then we followed the tracks for about another kilometre to see if we’d see a tail mark or a turd or anything else to confirm the identification. There was nothing except paw prints.
The pictures turned out well, so I sent them to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR). They confirmed that the tracks were indeed a cougar, and they told me that the photos would be considered a bona fide sighting of a cougar on Manitoulin Island. After that, instead of forgetting about it, I went a little cougar crazy for a while. Every night for at least a month I had dreams about seeing the cougar. I became fixated on finding some way to get DNA for testing to see whether this was a wild cougar or an escaped pet of Chilean origin—because, at the time, this was the theory about the origin of the cougars in Ontario. What’s more, any time I was in the bush and saw a large turd with hair in it, I collected it and sent it to OMNR until they finally told me to quit sending them poop unless I was really sure it was from a cougar. They also told me that wolf droppings can carry some very bad parasites and that I had better quit handling the stuff unless I was taking serious precautions. That kind of cured me of the obsession.
It’s great that someone finally got video to confirm what I, Steve Hall, Lyle Dewar, and many other people have said all along. There ARE cougars on Manitoulin Island.
Judith Jones
Sheguiandah
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you have a cougar story, email it to editor@manitoulin.ca, fax it to 705-368-3822 or mail it to The Expositor Office, Box 369, Little Current, ON P0P 1K0.
