After 60 Years, North Carolina Panthers May Be Back

[Original headline: Sightings of panthers spur talk of big cat's return to N.C. ]

The Carolina panthers may be making a comeback. And not on the playing field, sports fans.

These panthers are the genuine item: native felines with stealthy moves, tawny coats and long, distinctive tails.

There hasn't been a confirmed, "official" sighting in the wild for at least 60 years.

But a growing contingent of optimists -- including former Gov. Jim Hunt -- are convinced that the eastern panther is reclaiming its homeland in this state.

"Isn't that something?" Hunt said, almost dreamily.

Of course, there are detractors, pessimists (perhaps realists?) who say the panther is a figment of the public's imagination. A bobcat in the shadows. Wishful thinking.

Wib Owen, for example, personally investigates at least a dozen panther "sightings" every year as section manager with the N.C. Division of Wildlife Management.

"I've been in this job 22 1/2 years," Owen said. During that time, he has fielded hundreds of panther reports.

"I don't know that we have yet to document a single sighting," Owen said. "Most of the time they're dogs. There are probably real panthers out there, but I would guess they're pets that were released into the wild."

Owen says the number of sightings always increases after some word of the panther, also referred to as the cougar or mountain lion, makes its way into the news. A creeping figure combined with high expectations can cause the mind to draw false conclusions, Owen said.

But even Owen admits that if the panther/cougar were ever to reclaim its homeland, the conditions right now are ideal.

The eastern cougar once inhabited a vast swath of the eastern seaboard, and sightings have been reported across the region recently. In North Carolina, reports have come from rural Eastern North Carolina and the far western mountains, said Fred Bonner, editor of Carolina Adventure and a retired biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Bonner refers to the panther as wildlife's answer to the UFO or Loch Ness monster. "With all those sightings, there has got to be some truth in it," Bonner said.

Charles R. "Buster" Humphreys Jr. of Wilmington goes even further. Humphreys is author of the 1994 book "Panthers of the Coastal Plain." He claims to have recorded well over 500 sightings -- half of them sightings of coal black panthers, which wildlife experts say have never lived in the state.

What could account for a cougar comeback? The conditions for the panther have turned around in recent years. A greater focus on habitat preservation has resulted in the conservation of hundreds of thousands of acres in Eastern North Carolina alone. More than 100,000 acres have been set aside, in fact, for the red wolf recovery effort in the Alligator River area.

Meanwhile, the prey base for panthers is thriving. The cats feed primarily on deer, as well as some smaller animals.

Even skeptics such as Owen, whose division "manages" the white tail deer and other animal populations, concede that there are "plenty of deer" for a top predator to hunt.

"We have lengthened the hunting season," he said. "There are no large predators to control the deer population."

It was a dwindling prey base, as well as hunting, that led to the panther's retreat from North Carolina back in the 1930s. It's no coincidence that the last confirmed wild panther sighting occurred about the same time the Division of Wildlife Management was created, Owen said.

The cats were overhunted by an encroaching human population. And with a smaller herd of deer, the panther was literally starving -- and forced to move on to richer, safer hunting grounds. Nowadays, the only protected habitat carved out specifically for the panther is the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge near Naples.

In North Carolina, habitats have been preserved for several other endangered species. The bald eagle restoration has gone so well that the raptor will likely be removed from the endangered species list sometime this year.

Sid Shearin, superintendent of Pettigrew State Park near Washington, N.C., believes that the panther may be taking advantage of some of those protected areas to carve out new hunting grounds for itself.

Shearin is one of the cougar's true believers -- with good reason.

He swears he saw a panther cross the road in front of his car late one night 15 years ago.

"My wife and I were coming home when a cat ran across the road into the cornfield," Shearin said. "He was tawny, and he moved like a cat. But the clincher was his tail. He had the long tail of an eastern cougar. That was no bobcat."

After 17-plus years as a forester and ranger in North Carolina, he knows the difference.

After his chance sighting, Shearin tried to document the panther's existence Down East. It became his hobby. But not too long after word got out about Shearin's interest, someone shot two cougars scavenging near a Dumpster in Tyrell County.

"It turned out that at least one was a pen-raised cougar," Shearin said. "But the fact that somebody would shoot him, well, that killed my enthusiasm for looking."

Shearin no longer worries about publicity; he believes the Endangered Species Act offers the protection the panther needs. Under the act, hunters face a $5,000 fine for shooting a panther.

These days Shearin keeps up with sightings informally. He can still spot the dreamers and the confused.

"Most people have seen enough Lincoln Mercury commercials to know what a bobcat looks like by now," said Shearin. "But some people see big cat and immediately think panther."

Shearin said that although it has been 15 years since he spied his cougar, he believes they are still roaming the eastern wilds.

After all, he said, felines are secretive. Bobcats are plentiful in the state, and even as a park superintendent, Shearin has only seen four of those since 1983.

As for the panthers, Shearin said, "I would like to think they're still here."

• Story originally published by •
News & Observer, Raleigh / NC | By Ruth Sheehan - December 7 2001