SEUL CHOIX POINT -- Mike Zuidema, a retired state forester, spent the first 10 years of his career assuring people that they were wrong when they reported cougar sightings.

"Our biologists told me there were no cougars in Michigan, and I believed them," he said.

Then he saw a huge, long-tailed cat run across the road in front of his car near his home in Escanaba. His report was laughed off by his colleagues at the Department of Natural Resources, and he spent the next 20 years gathering every sighting he could find to prove that cougars were alive and breeding in the Upper Peninsula.

Zuidema has loose-leaf notebooks filled with 800 credible cougar reports, which earned him the nickname "Crazy Mike" among some DNR employees. These days, though, he feels vindicated by new DNA evidence and verified cougar tracks.

They prove what many residents of the UP and northern Lower Peninsula have known for decades -- the ghost cats still roam the woods of Michigan.

But Zuidema can't figure out why so many people in the DNR are stubbornly ignoring the findings of 21st Century science, and why the agency has been reluctant to take over the search from a foundation that proved cougars are still here 95 years after they were listed as exterminated.

Dr. Patrick Rusz, a biologist for the Michigan Wildlife Habitat Foundation, found cougar feces -- commonly called scat -- in some of the wildest areas of the Upper Peninsula. His findings were confirmed by DNA tests.

"You'd think with this kind of evidence, they'd have no choice but to admit that a breeding population of cougars is there," Zuidema said of the DNR.

The foundation's findings are causing some DNR biologists to conclude that it might be time to revisit the policy that says there are no breeding cougars in the state.

"I think there's no doubt that people have seen cougars in Michigan," said Dale Rabe, chief of the DNR's wildlife research unit. "The question is, what is their origin. Until now, we had no evidence of breeding. It seemed more likely that they were escaped or released pets, or perhaps cougars that came in from Minnesota. We know that they occasionally will move hundreds of miles.

"I think we need to do some more work based on (Rusz's) new findings. I also think that perhaps we should be attempting to capture one to get better DNA samples. And if it turns out there is a breeding population, then we need to come up with a management plan to ensure their future, whether they are a remnant population or from some other source."

Insiders in the DNR wildlife division said the department has been galvanized to capture one of the big cats before a private group does it (a capture permit from the state is required). The DNR has put Brad Johnson, its best wolf trapper, on the task.

The habitat foundation, based in Bath, specializes in restoring places where wild things can live. One night last week, Rusz told a group of people gathered at the Seul Choix Point Lighthouse near Gulliver, an area that produces regular cougar sightings, that "I don't feel like a hotshot scientist now. I really feel kind of stupid. All we did was come up here and prove what a lot of people already knew."

Many people in the audience had sighted cougars in the past 30 years, and the DNR blew them off as mistaken identification of other animals or a few pet cougars that had escaped or been set loose. But Rusz said escaped pets can't explain the huge number of sightings, and the DNA results are conclusive.

Dale Willey was startled one day last spring to see a big cougar in a field on the farm he and his wife, Pam, run near Tower in Cheboygan County. A few weeks later, one of their Belgian draft horse mares dropped a premature foal in a pasture, but when Pam Willey went out to see it, the 70-pound foal was gone.

"If coyotes or a bear had killed it, there would have been a bloody mess right there," she said. "But we didn't find so much as a hair."

Curious but not particularly upset at the cat, Dale Willey used an excavator to scrape a dirt road around the pasture. He checked it daily for tracks. Two weeks later, he called Rusz, who made a plaster cast of a cougar print 4 1/2 inches wide. Male cougars average 150-180 pounds and can reach 250.

When Rusz sent a photograph of the Tower print to Harley Shaw, a retired Arizona Game and Fish Department biologist and a cougar expert, Shaw said, "That's about as big a track as you'll ever see."

Rusz said: "There's not much else that could walk away with a 70-pound horse." He also said he has seen a video that showed a cougar entering a suburban California neighborhood, killing a 50-pound dog in seconds and then jumping a six-foot fence with the dog in its mouth.

Cheryl Reed, a painter who lives in Cross Village in Emmet County, was with friends Allison Loubert and Dawn Szabo at a horse corral on Szabo's farm in 1997 when Reed was stunned to see "an African lioness walking toward us across an open field. Then I realized that we were seeing a mountain lion. It was bigger than what I thought cougars would be, seven to eight feet long, including its tail.

"It saw us, stopped and watched us for a while, then just ignored us and walked off into the woods. We couldn't believe it. The horses were going crazy, and we were just frozen."

The women watched the cat stroll past 20 yards away. When Reed told the DNR, the response was "extreme skepticism," she said, "and I could tell they thought I was, you know. . . . "

But her story elicited a different response from other area residents: "I hear you've seen the cougar."

"And I thought, 'the cougar?' So I started gathering all the information I could."

Reed prepared a neatly typed, 12-page report titled, "Twenty Cougar Sightings, 1990-2001: Bliss, Cross Village, Center and McKinley Townships, Emmet County, Michigan."

Sheila Grogan, a maternity nurse, lives at Lake Ann near Traverse City. She was sitting on her deck at dusk in August, talking to a friend on the telephone, when she heard a twig snap in the woods behind her. It happened again, "and I thought there was an animal or a person walking through the woods next to the house," she said. "I ran inside to get a spotlight. I figured I'd either see a deer or scare the crap out of someone."

Grogan went back outside, shone the light onto the lawn "and there was a mountain lion at the base of a tree" only feet away. "It was in a crouched position, and it was staring at me. I was so amazed I just sat there and stared back. It looked like it was just curious."

After several minutes, she gathered her wits and went inside for a video camera, "but it was so dark I didn't get anything. It eventually got up and sort of sauntered off. That's when I saw the long, thick tail. This thing was bigger than our neighbor's dog (a large golden retriever). It was brown, and what really surprised me was that the tail had dark rings around it."

When she told her story to friends, some suggested she had seen a raccoon, and "I think the consensus was that I was insane," Grogan said. She made a report to the DNR and was told "it was not possible for me to see that, and if I did, it was an escaped pet." So Grogan went to a zoo, where "I looked at the lynx, and it wasn't that. And the bobcat was way too small. Then I came to the mountain lion and said, 'That's it, except this one's tail doesn't have dark rings.' "

Cougars usually are described as afraid of people, but Rusz thinks cougars that aren't hunted have no fear of humans.

"It's clear from people who had close encounters that cougars are pretty much indifferent to man," Rusz said. "You aren't prey, you aren't a threat, so they ignore you.

"When we were getting ready to do our field work, we went to see some captive cougars. I bent down to look at a track, and the cougar started stalking me. I was kind of startled and stood up. The cougar came out of its crouch and looked around with a puzzled expression, like it was thinking, 'Where the hell did that prey animal go?' We found that if you bend over, it's like turning on a switch in the cat's head that sends it into stalking mode."

Rusz and two assistants walked miles of UP beaches, trails and swamps near Gulliver and on the Stonington Peninsula in the UP looking for cougar scat. The big surprise was how easy it was to find, and they found that the dunes on Lake Michigan were "a giant litter box," Rusz said. Rusz sent 14 scat samples to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department laboratory. Nine came back positive for cougar DNA.

"The others probably were cougar, too, but even if you saw the cat drop the stuff, you'd only have a 50-50 chance of finding cougar DNA," Rusz said.

That's because 99.9 percent of the DNA in cougar scat is from whatever the cat ate (usually compressed deer hair and bits of bone). The detectable cougar DNA comes from a few cells scraped off the cat's gut as the food passes through.

"And other things affect the odds, like chemical reactions in the scat and external factors like weathering," Rusz said.

Though it will take more DNA testing to confirm it, he said, the large amount of scat his team has found, the varied size of cougar tracks and their wide geographic spread make it clear that Michigan cougars are a breeding population. Rusz estimates perhaps 20-30 live in the UP and another 10-15 in the northern Lower Peninsula.

Rusz's field study conflicts with the official DNR position that the last Michigan cougar was killed in 1906. The agency has said any sightings are either escaped or released pets, a cougar that wandered in from Minnesota, or a misidentified bobcat, wolf, coyote or other animal.

But cougars have been seen regularly from 1906 until today. When Rusz began preparing for his field study, several Western cougar experts told him there's a definitive way to confirm that scat is from a cougar, or at least a wild cat: Smell it.

"So we went to pens where they had captive cougars and wolves and ran back and forth smelling animal crap," Rusz said. "And by god, there really was a difference."

They dubbed the technique the Escanaba sniff test, after Zuidema's hometown. When they came across some scat near Gulliver, they held it under their noses and inhaled like wine connoisseurs testing the bouquet of a fine Bordeaux.

"Wow! That's the real stuff," Rusz said with a grin, holding the scat under the nose of a novice cougar tracker. The pungent, acrid aroma is similar to the smell from a house cat's overused litter box, but far more intense.

"You'll never mistake that smell for a wolf," Rusz said. "We don't know why cougar scat has such a strong odor. It may be because they have a short gut. Food passes through quicker, so they may have to have stronger digestive acids."

Non-scientists probably don't understand the incredible power of the new DNA testing methods, Rusz said. Standing on a remote UP trail, holding a plastic bag of cougar droppings that probably were deposited two days before, he said, "We can go out and collect a lot of this stuff. We can say it's the right length, right diameter, properly segmented, full of compacted deer hair and looks like stuff we already proved was from a cougar. It can even pass the Escanaba sniff test.

"But when you get down to it, all we really have is a handful of (scat). The geneticists can take that (scat) and paint us a picture of the individual animal that it came from. It's just incredible."

• Story originally published by:
Detroit Free Press / MI | Eric Sharp - Nov 15.01

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