People have been spotting mountain lions throughout the state, which would be neat…if they actually exist.

The Morning Call Online has the word:

Still, the overwhelming absence of proof has done little to discourage residents from submitting dozens of mountain lion sightings to the Pennsylvania Game Commission each year. Cal DuBrock, director of the commission’s Bureau of Wildlife Management, said the number of reports seems to have hit an all-time high in recent months.

”I can’t recall a time when we’ve had more,” DuBrock said. ”Yet we don’t have a carcass in hand or any tangible evidence.”

I hope they are making a comeback but, like the man said, things tend to end up dead on the side of the road once in a while.

Every so often, there will be a big cat sighting in suburban Philly and, as much as I’d like the stories to be true, they often end up to be escaped pets or the confabulations of mistaken/panicked witnesses. In the UK, they’ve been plagued with ABC (Alien Big Cat) sightings, a weird mix of UFO and cryptozoology, for a few years. Again, the ABC is usually either escaped or bunkum.

The notion isn’t absurd, of course. (Well, the non-alien aspect isn’t, anyway.) It isn’t like there never were cougars here before. We’ve been seeing a lot more “wild” animals making their way into developed areas. Part because of encroaching development, I suppose, but I wonder if it isn’t also part that the older burbs are becoming greener, with more wooded areas. At least around my area.

It wasn’t so long ago that coyotes were unheard of in Pennsylvania and Delaware, now they’re downright common. Cougars, especially, are making their way out of the mountains and into the Midwest, occasionally eating a jogger or hiker.

Cougar attacks aren’t on my list of worries. If cougars are in Pennsylvania, they have been well behaved. One mangled jogger or chomped trick-or-treater may persuade me. But then, if they are in Pennsylvania, they have learned how to cross the road.

Or bury their dead.

Of course, that means they’ve become intelligent and have mastered simple tool use, which isn’t a good thing necessarily