I was running on an unused logging road and came up behind a wild cat. It didn’t see me coming, so I got pretty close, maybe 20 feet away. It turned and stared at me for a second and then took off up a steep hill.
It was about 2.5 feet to the top of it’s head, a little smaller than a Labrador. It wasn’t a bobcat or lynx, because it had a long tail, but I don’t think it was long enough to be a mountain lions tail(I don’t remember seeing it curled). It had a brown coat and the tail had a stripey bit at the tip. 100% a cat from the body shape and movement.
But after looking it up, it seems like mountain lions basically don’t exist in new england, or at least are extremely rare. Its limbs were not as thick as the mountain lion images I’m finding online.
I thought maybe it was one of those megasized housecats, but this trail is separated from town by a deep and wide river, any housecat would have had to walk 3 miles and across 2 bridges(one of which is a metal mesh footbridge) or 7 miles along the logging road to get to the nearest house. It’s also below freezing out and there’s 5+ inches of snow on the ground.
It’s making me feel like I hallucinated this or something, because it doesn’t seem possible. Hopefully I’ll see it again now that I’ve looked at a ton of wild cat pictures. I was trying to remember as much detail as possible when I saw it, but I didn’t know what to look for.
You gotta accept that your perception and recollection of the animal will both be imperfect. Plus, there’s substantial individual variety in any large mammal species. So all of your guesses are plausible. It’s not out of the question you saw a mountain lion wandering New England - they can travel enormous distances alone, especially males. It’s reasonable that it might have been a bocat or lynx and the angle you saw it just made the tail look longer than it actually was. It could be one of those crazy hybrid breeds of cat - 3 miles is really not that far for a stray housecat to wander.
This response is the one that makes the most sense to me. In particular, I trust LanyrdSkynrd’s perception of it’s shape and movements as being “cat”, but it can be surprisingly difficult to judge the size of an animal in the bush. Seems hard to believe that you could misidentify a tail where there was none (otherwise it would be Case Closed, You Saw A Bobcat). The Cougar/Mountain Lion hypothesis is not crazy. There are no permanent populations in New England, but it was part of their historic range, and they do show up on occasion. A juvenile mountain lion would fit your description, and they can definitely swim across water obstacles. But I had to bet on something, I would say that it was probably an escaped or feral exotic housecat hybrid.
It’s pretty interesting that you were able to surprise it, cats are usually so alert to their surroundings. Maybe it was hunting, and just zeroed in on it’s prey?
I love these kinds of mysteries, because there is usually no concrete answer, but exploring it helps us understand our natural world.
I was surprised by that too. I had turned around to head back when I encountered it, so I had passed that point 10-15 minutes before.
The occurred to me in that moment that I might have been the prey, but in retrospect I doubt it.
This is a good case for it being a formerly captive animal - it might just perceive humans as nbd. A mountain lion would probably be far more aware of humans in its vicinity than the inverse. But if it was a young one, who knows.
The problem is that this is NE. in NE we have a really high rural population density compared to the rest of the country. Our animals are very much attuned to living with humans. Our wildlife politics in the past years have had issues with this because city people moving to rural NE often have to contend with newer “friendlier” generations of black bears and that makes them go insane for whatever reason despite the fact that black bears are just big racoons.
There was a Mountain Lion that was smashed on the highway in Milford CT 13 years ago. Milford is not rural and stuck between two cities. The mountain lion likely got trapped because there’s a way to get to the place that it was through open space and rural towns.
When the state researched they found that “it was from South Dakota”, but that’s some bullshit because they typically only travel 100 miles form their habitat and what they mean by “from South Dakota” was that it’s DNA matches to a high percentage to DNA of a SD Mountain Lion population. It’s the same way that Haredi Jews in the US are “from Eastern Europe” if you ran the DNA the same way.
There’s just missing data and the NE states don’t care to fund ecological research to put the question to bed because it’s expensive.
All the wild/domestic hybrids have pretty striking coat patterns (Bengals have rosettes like jaguars or leopards, and Savannah Cats look just like their Serval ancestors), so if it was just brown, that’s probably unlikely. The only normal-ish cat that might get to be almost the size of a Labrador would be a Serval (or maybe a very large F1 Savannah male), and the coat definitely would have stood out on either of those. A mountain lion out of its normal range seems like by far the most likely explanation to me. Could be a younger male who is wandering in search of territory.
You’re definitely right about the limits of my recollection. Even though I was trying to remember everything it happened fast and my cognition is always a little wonky when I’m running.