Black panthers in Alabama?
Seen a black panther in Alabama? Statistics say 'no way’
The Tuscaloosa News
January 25, 2004
How do you know what to believe? All of the logic points one way. Credible people point another.
Wild panthers in Alabama are like UFOs; people want very badly to believe in them. Never was that demonstrated any more clearly than last week when a picture of a man holding a huge cougar began making the rounds on the Internet.
Information with the picture claimed the big cat was shot around Millbrook. Turns out the cougar met his end a little west of there -- Washington state. Yet, all it took was a picture and a claim and folks were saying, “We knew they were there all along."
I admit that it got my attention. The cat was anatomically correct to have possibly been killed in Alabama. But I was skeptical enough to check it out. As has been the case every time “proof" of a panther’s existence in Alabama appears, it turned out not to be true.
What are the facts? First, an animal known as a panther once roamed Alabama’s woodlands. This panther was the same thing as a cougar. The Florida panther, a subspecies of cougar, still exists in an isolated region of south Florida. Biologists believe that is the same animal that once called Alabama home.
“I think the scientific community is in pretty good agreement that this would have been in the range of the Florida panther," said Keith Guyse, a state biologist based in Montgomery. “From the mountains north, that would have been the range of the Eastern cougar."
The Florida panther still exists. There is no evidence that the Eastern cougar still exists.
Second, the last panther, cougar, mountain lion, whatever you prefer to call this beast, verified in the wild in Alabama was killed in 1948 in St. Clair County. The farmer who shot it took a picture of it. It was a 109-pound specimen.
There also seems to be some evidence that:
A cougar was shot in Tuscaloosa County in 1956
A cougar track was verified in the Stimpson Sanctuary in Clarke County in 1961
A state wildlife official verified a cougar den with cubs in northern Baldwin County sometime in the late 1950s or early ’60s.
Third, all of these verified cougars were golden in color. I’ve heard several reports of gold-colored cats that I believe. I believe the security guard at the factory near the Tuscaloosa airport who said he saw one. I believe my brother-in-law who caught a glimpse of one on a roadside near Selma. I believe them specifically because they identified these cats as having a golden coat.
I believe them because such a cat was once native to Alabama. I believe them because even if the native cats are all gone, what they’ve seen could be a caged cougar that escaped into the wild. Part of the reason I believe it is that people have heard their blood-curdling screams at night -- people who say they know the difference between what they’ve heard and the scream of a bobcat. In short, it’s at least theoretically possible.
Many people who report seeing panthers say the cats are black. I used to say that people who claimed to have seen black panthers were just lying. They wanted to spin a good hunting yarn, had heard about panthers in Alabama and had been to Tarzan movies. They assumed the “black panther" they saw in the Tarzan movie was the “panther" that inhabited Alabama and this was the evidence of their untruth.
The problem is, people who have recently told me about first-hand sightings of black panthers aren’t liars. They’re truthful people who don’t spin yarns for the heck of it. But the problem with believing them is that the darn animal just doesn't exist.
Sure, you’ve seen an all-black cat on TV or in a zoo and someone called it a black panther. Without a doubt, this animal is real. But there is no species of cat called a black panther.
These all-black cats, as documented by Mark Bailey in the Winter issue of Alabama Wildlife magazine, are “black phase" leopards and jaguars. Leopards live in Africa and jaguars live in Central and South America. These cats are normally spotted but every so often one turns out all black. But there is no species of big cat that is always all black.
No one has ever verified the existence of an all-black cougar or Florida panther anywhere, much less in Alabama. And that is the only species of long-tailed cat ever to inhabit Alabama. It would be rare enough to even see a cougar in Alabama. So calculate the odds of seeing a black one, the existence of which has never been verified.
“The species almost certainly no longer exists in Alabama, but even if there were a thousand left, it is extremely unlikely that there would be even one black individual," Bailey writes in his Alabama Wildlife article “The Myth of the Black Panther".
Frankly, biologists are skeptical that cougars or panthers of any color exist in Alabama. Their question is, “Where are they?"
Guyse notes that when hunters or biologists want to catch or kill a cougar out west or a Florida panther down south, they turn a pack of dogs loose. The cat, once jumped, almost immediately goes up a tree where it knows it’s safe from the dogs.
“There are dogs all over this state," Guyse said. “But they just don’t chase panthers up trees here."
Nobody has treed one on a deer drive. No one has shot one while stalk hunting (which I’m not encouraging because it’s highly illegal). No one has hit one with a car. No one has gotten a picture of one with an automatic game camera.
It might be argued that these are extremely elusive animals that live in only the remotest parts of the state. The same is true of Alabama’s tiny black bear population and Florida’s remnant panther population.
Yet each year, hunters manage to tree Florida panthers and Alabama black bears while hunting. Every year, a couple of each of these species are killed on highways and wildlife authorities document their deaths.
So what do I believe? I believe that a small number of cougar or panther sightings each year are true. They come from people like my brother-in-law who aren't hunters and have never heard of panthers or cougars in Alabama. They weren’t expecting to see a cougar or panther and yet they did.
I find it most likely that these are Western cougars escaped from captivity. They move until they quit seeing people and then they quit moving. Eventually they die without reproducing. That’s strictly a hypothesis.
But what about the mysterious black cats? I have a theory about how people came to believe that the panther that inhabited Alabama was black. I believe that they heard that a cat known as a panther once inhabited Alabama. Great Granddaddy saw one while he was squirrel hunting back in the 1890s.
But the real panther has long since disappeared. Great Granddaddy knew that the cat was tawny-colored and when he passed on the story, he saw no need to relate information about the cat’s color. Great Granddaddy was raised in rural Alabama without television or magazines. The only panther he’d ever heard of was golden colored, so there was no need to tell anyone it was a “golden panther."
Having heard his elder’s story but having never seen a panther in Alabama or even a picture of one, Grandson goes to the zoo or circus or sees “Look" magazine. Behind bars or in glossy ink is a solid black “panther," really a black phase leopard or jaguar. He surmises that this is the kind of cat Great Granddaddy ran into.
As they years go by, he retells Great Granddaddy’s story and in it, the cat is always black. He and all who hear this yarn fully expect that when they see a panther it will be black. They don’t know that the real native panther was golden.
Some people see Labrador retrievers at a distance and they become panthers. Some people see large black housecats or even dark bobcats in low light and they become panthers. Usually all they get is a fleeting glance and for some reason don't have the right perspective on distance. Some may even see one of my theoretical feral cougars and, so fully expecting it to be black, it becomes black in their mind.
Then there are two friends I have here in this building who claim to have observed one at close quarters. One friend says it leapt across the road in front of him in broad daylight. The other says she observed one on the edge of her yard as a child. Both have no doubts about what they saw.
These are truthful people with vivid memories. I don’t think they’re lying but I don’t know what they saw. As Guyse said of such reports, the people who saw it are the only ones who can pass judgment on what it was they saw.
But like the biologists, I’m going to have to see one dead or alive to believe it exists.
Reach Robert DeWitt at
[email protected] or at (205) 722-0203 or (866) 400-8477, Ext. 203.
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Reader's response to above story:
Black panthers do live in Alabama
Susie Kornegay
Centreville
February 02, 2004
Dear Editor: I read an interesting article in The Tuscaloosa News a few days ago titled “Seen a black panther in Alabama? No way," by Robert DeWitt. I was a little disappointed in the writing about cats and panthers not being in Alabama.
I live in Bibb County. I haven’t studied a lot about animals and haven’t been hunting but a few times. But since I was a child and lived in the country, I have heard of black panthers roaming the woods in Alabama. Our forefathers talked about them, and I believed their stories -- or their truths -- about seeing them.
Two or three years ago, I was driving on the highway near a swamp (near 82, east of Tuscaloosa in Eoline, Alabama). I was on my way home when a big black panther crossed the road right in front of me. It was big, beautiful and as black as an ace of spades.
I’m not able to prove it to anyone else (especially the writer) because if I had had a camera, I would have been afraid to get out of the car and would not have had time to snap a picture.
People should take other folks at their word more, because I could hardly believe it myself. You know animals have four legs and are free to roam where they please.
You can’t always go by statistics. In my case, I guess seeing is believing.
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sureshot