Do You Want Mountain Lions in New Jersey?

Eastern cougar (Puma concolor couguar) USFWS

I would say the answer is Yes for the many people who contact me with reports of sighting mountain lions in New Jersey Wildlife. I also get reports of moose and wolves (not coywolves, which do exist in our state).

The official word from the NJDEP is still that there are none of those three in our state and that the bobcat is still N.J.'s only wild cat.

John Parke wrote:

There is not a year that goes by where I do not meet someone who knows someone who heard of a guy that either swears he saw or heard that there was a sighting of a mountain lion roaming the woods and fields of N.J. in recent years. In fact, we here at N.J. Audubon also get actual "physical evidence" of these sightings in the form of emailed photos. What is funny is that most of these photos that get circulated actually show, mountain lions walking in snow covered driveways right in Sussex County, N.J. or at least that's what the emails say.
Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how much you really want to have mountain lions back, the vegetation also shown in the same photos are usually western species, the license plates on the cars in the driveway are from Colorado or Montana, or occasionally a mule deer will also be standing in the driveway as well we don’t have mule deer in N.J. Oh well another N.J. mountain lion sighting email debunked again.

Even at its full size, our bobcats don't really look like a cougar

A grainy photo from a hunter's camera seems to show a "big cat" in this photo provided to the Winslow Township Police Department

Last year, a report of a "large cat" sighting in Winslow Township near the Hammonton border got warnings out for local residents.  The DEP said it was a "house cat," not even a bobcat. But, as one person told me, "That's just like when the government calls a UFO a weather balloon." Conspiracy theories abound these days.

Adding some fuel to the idea of cougars in NJ is the fact that mountain lions were indigenous at one time in this area but have not existed naturally here for many years. Mountain lions were functionally extinct in the mid-Atlantic states by 1882.

Despite that information about cougars being functionally extinct for over a century, the NJDEP, USFWS and this blog continue to receive reports of sightings. No reports have been confirmed as being the eastern cougar subspecies.

Some people posit that these individual cougars are released pets or mountain lions who have come in from western populations.

Going much further back in NJ cougar history, mountain lions were hunted for livestock protection, and also for growing markets for fur in the 1600s because furs from the Americas were being shipped to Europe.

If a mountain lion (Eastern cougar or eastern puma, Puma concolor couguar) did live in New Jersey it would have to be part of the extinct or extirpated population of cougars that once lived in northeastern North America. Eastern cougars were unofficially deemed extinct by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) evaluation in 2011 and they were formally removed from the endangered species list and declared it to be extinct in 2018. Cougars are still common in western North America and there have been individuals from that population occasionally seen in the eastern cougar's former range, though not in or near New Jersey.

According to Wikipedia, privately run groups have formed since the 1970s in nearly every state to compile and investigate records of cougar sightings and many are convinced that breeding populations of cougars exist throughout the region. A smaller number believe that a conspiracy to hide information or secretly reintroduce cougars is actively underway by state and federal governments. Some also believe that there is possible colonization of the east by western cougars that have wandered hundreds of miles from their established breeding ranges in the Dakotas or elsewhere in the west.