COUGAR!

Road kill discovered off Interstate 64 near Keswick late last week spurred hopes that the carcass might be a specimen of the legendary — and supposedly extinct — eastern cougar.

It was just a regular old bobcat. Yet another false alarm.

“We did have an incident, but it turned out to be a baby bobcat,” Albemarle County spokeswoman Lee Catlin said. “That’s probably the closest thing we have to a cougar around here.”

At least two area residents had notified The Daily Progress that the hefty feline carcass they saw on the side of the highway was almost certainly a cougar — also known as a mountain lion, puma, panther, catamount and dozens of other names.

Though it turned out to be merely the elusive cat’s common cousin, the excitement surrounding last week’s road kill underscores the growing prevalence of cougar sightings in Central Virginia.

Dozens of witnesses have reported seeing cougars in recent years. Among the local eyewitnesses have been veterinarians, environmental scientists, wildlife photographers and outdoors enthusiasts.

Farm worker Carl Rainey, for example, spotted a cougar last summer while riding an all-terrain vehicle across a cow pasture in Crozet.

“I’ve seen a couple,” he said. “I know what a cougar looks like. I’m 76 years old. I can see. I’m not making it up. There was no doubt in my mind that it was a cougar.”

Despite all the sightings, game wardens with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries remain unconvinced.

“We can’t find the track. We can’t find a little bit of spore. Cat hair. Nothing,” said Sgt. Kenneth Dove of the law enforcement division of the state agency.

Forged photographs?

Cougar enthusiasts have resorted to forging photographs, Dove said, and have posted the images on the Internet as proof that the big cat is back in Virginia.

“All the so-called photos I’ve seen are either obviously Photoshopped or were taken out-of-state,” Dove said. “It tends to be quite irritating. People are going crazy about cougars.”

The large carnivorous cats once roamed the mountains of Virginia and surrounding states but are now officially considered extinct in the eastern United States, with the one exception being Florida’s panthers. The last cougar confirmed in Virginia was in Washington County in 1882.

Dove said he suspects most of the eyewitnesses are probably misidentifying the species. It might be a case of wishful thinking, he said, or a desperate desire to see the return of something long gone.

“They really want it to be true,” he said.

Last year, Crozet was gripped with cougar mania. The pages of the Crozet Gazette were filled with reports of big cat sightings. When a Maryland resident wrote in and likened the cougar to a “homicidal maniac,” Crozet residents jumped to defend their mountain lion. One reader proposed designating the cougar as Crozet’s mascot. Another, writing in the voice of the Crozet cougar, said that he might devour Marylanders.

“Please be assured that should the deer, squirrels, rabbits, possums, etc., run out, I will restrict myself to eating only extremely unruly children, ugly pets and people from Maryland,” wrote “Felis Cougar.”

Skepticism abounds

There is a chance that a cougar or two escaped from captivity into Virginia’s wilderness. The cougars being spotted could be a wild North American or imported South American breed, said Barbara Chaplin, executive director of Cougar Quest-Virginia, a Frederick County-based organization that tracks and maps reports of cougar sightings in Virginia and surrounding states.

Chaplin said that ironclad proof of cougars is needed, but extremely hard to come by.

“Photographs, video, tape recordings, and paw prints are extremely helpful,” she said. “Proof beyond a shadow of a doubt involves DNA testing — an expensive proposition, not always viable, and always controversial.”

Most of the photos that have emerged as proof are inconclusive. Several cougar photos posted on the Internet have been debunked as hoaxes.

University of Virginia environmental science professor John Porter said that it is certainly possible that a cat with the size and sneakiness of a cougar could go undetected in Virginia, but he is highly skeptical. There have been no confirmed cougars killed by cars; motion sensor cameras have failed to capture any cougar images; and no scat samples have turned up.

“I would expect that if they were out there, we’d see something more definitive,” he said. “That said, there’s nothing harder to detect than a rare species.”

Porter thinks people want to believe that the big critters are out there, he said, because cougars are deadly, rare, powerful and intriguing.

“Mysterious and dangerous is sort of a good mix,” he said. “It makes for a good campfire story.”

Douglas Inkley, a Reston-based senior scientist with the National Wildlife Foundation, said his view of the cougar question has evolved. In the past, he dismissed cougar witnesses out of hand, as some dismiss those who claim to see Bigfoot. Now, however, several species long thought extinct have re-emerged. These animals have included the black-footed ferret and the ivory-billed woodpecker.

“There have been other species in the history of man that we thought were extinct, but were not,” he said. “We’ve been fooled before.”

Is there a possibility that a mountain lion is prowling the woods and mountains of the Charlottesville area?

“There is that possibility,” Inkley said.

The sightings, he said, could be cases of misidentification, examples of an escaped cougar pet or the genuine article. Or it could be a lot of hogwash.

“It might be like the UFO sightings in Roswell,” Inkley said. “One person sees something in the sky, and the next thing you know, everyone’s seeing aliens. … People want to believe that they’ve encountered something unusual.”