The Central region of Ontario has become a hotbed of cougar activity of late, following an incident in Bracebridge earlier this month, and the trend continues…
While vacationing at his family cottage in the Dorset/Lake of Bays-area last week, Scott Hamilton (not the skater) spotted a very large and mysterious-looking black cat on the edge of the village.
“The cat was about 4 feet in length with a long tail, and was up and down a tree in seconds!” Scott recalls
Hamilton was so taken aback by what he saw that he picked up the phone and called nearby Guha’s Lion and Tiger Farm, to see if any big cats had escaped.
Guha confirmed (as they did following the Bracebridge cougar shooting) that all their cats where in order, and explained to Scott that what he saw was, most likely, a jaguar.
Scott asked around and no one else had seen any large cats lurking around town.
Evidently this black cougar is on the prowl in the Dorset-area; creating even further mystery at a time when big cat sightings seem to be popping-up behind every tree in Central Ontario.
Although black cougar sightings are even more rare then the typical brown cougar sightings, there have been a handful documented over the years.
Back in August, 2010, a farmer in Wainfleet near Lake Erie, snapped this trail-cam image of, what appears to be a large black cat with a long tail; looking very much like a black cougar.
At the time, Ontario’s foremost cougar expert Dr. Rick Rosatte, dismissed the image as nothing more than “an eye-bending perspective on an overfed tomcat”
With this latest big black cat sighting in Dorset, the myth and mystery of the cougar(brown or black) continues …
I urge folks in the Dorset-area to keep on the look-out for a large black cat. If the Bracebridge cougar serves as an example, this animal in Lake of Bays will likely show its face again.
Outdoorsguy