Black jaguar; could they be mating with pumas to create a hybrid big cat?
Strangely, in some parts of North America, black-furred big cats make up over half the eyewitness reports of mountain lions, but zoologists say black pumas don’t exist. If that’s true, then exactly what are these ebony felines? Some say they are mutations or hybrids, others point to ancient beliefs of area Native Americans that the black big cats are guardian spirit animals. Might one small central Wisconsin town hold a clue to this growing mystery?
This puzzling and eerie phenomenon is the basis (as written in my book, “I Know What I Saw” ) for my debut film documentary as director/producer of Return to Wildcat Mountain; Wisconsin’s Black Panther Nexus.The film has been unanimously selected in one of the premiere release positions March 7th at the Midwest Weirdfest Film Festival in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
I provided original art and served as writer and director, with my husband, Steve Godfrey, as co-producer. Our son Nate Godfrey, a film maker with a degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, also lent his directorial skills, and created the camera, audio, animation, and editing. ..pretty much everything that required hands on film know-how. Former newspaper editor/journalist Steven Stanek, Hillsboro WI, shared the decades of amazing eyewitness reports he has collected for his news column and became our field producer.
We will announce streaming availability very soon and will also have hard cover DVDs for sale at the Midwest Weirdfest.
(Not a Milwaukee lion) By K Fink (NPS) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The past week’s sightings of one, possibly two mountain lions in the city of Milwaukee have captured the media limelight across the nation. The Milwaukee Lion or Lions (as one witness claimed to have seen two) have been skulking around Milwaukee’s north side, giving police the slip after allegedly ripping the head off a house cat and prowling in people’s back yards.
I’m not surprised; mountain lions have been sighted all over Wisconsin in the past few decades–long after they were supposed to have been eradicated in this state–including my own neighborhood eight miles north of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, just two years ago, when my husband was nearly attacked by one in our back yard! He had walked outside after dark and ended up walking backwards back to the house, yelling and waving his arms and kicking at the animal which was only a few feet away from him. Luckily it ran back in the woods when he reached the house. He also saw it at close distance the next morning, and so did two neighbors on different ends of the street. None of them reported it.
Also, A person I know whose family farms east of Elkhorn told me that a another family member observed two mountain lions checking out their livestock this past spring. They didn’t report it. I also saw many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of wht looked like fresh mountain lion prints (5 inches, no claw marks, correct shape) in the snow on a path I was hiking with friends in the northern part of the Kettle Moraine State Forest, Southern Unit, this past February. It was not a long hike!
Godfrey measuring possible cougar prints in Kettle Moraine Feb. 2015
Nor is this the first time one has been reported in the greater Milwaukee area. The Waukesha Freeman ran an article by Kollin Kosmicki in its Good Morning Today section July 13, 2005 titled, “Is There a Mountain Lion in Waukesha?” The sighting had been made June 1, 2005, by Phil Buteyn in Minooka Park, only 30 yards from the path he walked with his grand daughter. Buteyn, a retired school teacher, was adamant that he identified the animal correctly, having seen it from a relatively short distance in good, daylight conditions. Kosmicki said Local DNR warden Kyle Drake noted there was also a sighting reported in Pewaukee in fall, 2004.
Many will remember the cougar shot in Chicago’s Roscoe Village area in mid-April, 2008. That animal was traced through DNA evidence back to Wisconsin and specifically southeastern Wisconsin, including the area north of Elkhorn in Walworth County. Another was killed in Morrison, Illinois on Nov. 26, 2013, 130 miles west of Chicago. Both cougars were thought by most wildlife authorities to have migrated from the Black Hills area, looking for mates and new territory. I think it’s very possible the present Milwaukee sightings hail from that same source, although it’s also very possible it was an escaped, illegal pet. It’s been about ten years since a Wisconsin State Patrol officer told me he stopped a car whose driver was transporting three cougar cubs in the back seat!
I do have a huge file on cougar sightings elsewhere in the state–a stunning amount of them–within the past several decades. I’m in the final week before the deadline for my next book or I’d be compiling them all here right now, but I promise they are next. That’s why I added “Part One” to my title here. I believe cougars are not as rare in Wisconsin as people think, but they are under-reported. And in the meantime, I’m waiting along with everyone else to find out what happens in Milwaukee. Judging by what’s happened in Illinois, it may not be pretty.
Mystery cat taken in Rock County several years ago
The DNR’s investigation into the Deerfield horse-killing Dec. 29 is concluded today with the release of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory necropsy, said DNR Deputy Spokesman Robert Manwell in a phone interview. He sent me a copy of the lab’s report, which said the wound was not consistent with an animal attack at all.
The official description: “The distance from the soles of the front feet to the midpoint of the wound
is four feet (120 cm). The laceration is consistent with that produced by a sharp linear or curvilinear metal edge, entering the ventral aspect of the neck with considerable force at an angle. The wound is consistent with a single, large laceration. The cause of death is exsanguination.”
It sounds to me as if some warped human tried to cut off the poor horse’s head with a big knife or sword, failed, and then the animal bled to death. Why? In October, 2007, someone beheaded a juvenile alpaca on a farm near Delavan for no apparent reason. Until the culprits are caught, it is only possible to speculate about such brutal acts. And there should have been boot or shoe prints in the snow.
I should mention that the tan quarterhorse weighed over 1,000 pounds and should not have been an easy target.
Paulette Stelpflug, co-owner of Freedom Stables in the town of Deerfield in eastern Dane County, Wisconsin, experienced a sad and shocking holiday week when a stable worker found a seven-year old tan quarter horse dead with its neck torn out on December 29. Something powerful enough to take out the carotid and jugular with one “swipe” was the culprit, according to veterinarian Rene Reynolds. He added that the cut was too deep for the horse to have accidentally cut itself on something, and that no structure or machinery that could have caused such an accident was found in the vicinity.
There were, however, some good-sized animal tracks nearby in the snow. Stelpflug said they included “pokey marks” made by claws, according to a series of nbc15.com articles by reporter Zac Schultz. She believed they were cougar tracks, not an unreasonable assumption given the fact there have been confirmed cougars in southeastern Wisconsin in the past several years.
There are several potential problems with the cougar theory, however. For one thing, cougars nearly always walk with claws retracted, although claw marks could possibly show up in a track made just as the big cat was about to pounce. DNR wardens examined the entire property the following day and said the only tracks were “dog” tracks, perhaps due to that very reason. No measurements of the tracks were given by the owner or DNR.
DNR official Greg Matthews also said the attack was uncharacteristic of a cougar because no other marks were found on the horse, and no part of the horse was dragged It didn’t have to be a cougar; there are other large predators around. Black bears and timber wolves might make occasional forays into this part of the state, but a bear would have left distinct footprints. Wolves normally hunt large animals in packs, but do leave large, dog-like prints. A huge, feral dog would best fit the tracks. But none of these possible culprits seems to fit the facts of this case very exactly.
All of this reminded me of an incident in 1972 about two miles from Jefferson, Wisconsin, and only about fifteen miles east of Deerfield Township. In this instance, a horse received a thirty-inch slash in its neck and survived. But according to a DNR official I interviewed about 20 years later that had been on the scene, the horse owner saw an unknown, upright, hairy hominoid on her property immediately before the attack. The former warden, David Gjetson, told me she seemed very credible and sincere.
The woman first called him to report that she had seen a large, upright “apelike”
illustration by Nate Godfrey - hominoid bringing down a deer
creature walking in her farmyard. He investigated the site but found nothing. Two weeks later, the creature returned and boldly walked up on her front porch and rattled the front door of her house. It left deep scratches in the siding seven feet off the ground. It then walked to the woman’s horse shed, and the woman heard her horse whinny in fear. The creature then crossed the farmyard and trampled her vegetable garden where it left foot-long tracks (no description of their appearance was given). When the woman finally dared run outside to check on her horse, she found it had a deep, 30-inch gash on its neck.
Gjetson said he remembered the incident very well, and that he had been able to provide no official explanation for the attack, and could not explain what the woman saw.
These are not the only strange creature sightings recorded in the vicinity. Jefferson is also the site of the former St. Coletta Institute where in 1936, night watchman Mark Schackelman encountered a tall, unknown hominoid with long claws digging in an ancient burial mound. The beast produced a polysyllabic utterance that sounded like “Gadarrah” to the man. Gadara is a region of old Judea where the New Testament says Jesus cast spirits out of two demon-possessed men (Matthew 8).
I listed a total of about a dozen separate sightings of Bigfoot-like (as opposed to dogman-like) creatures that have occurred mostly within a corridor that runs from southwestern Jefferson County south into the western side of Walworth County and extends westward into northeastern Rock County. These incidents began with the 1936 St. Coletta sighting and span the decades until the most recent — which occurred at about 4 p.m. on July 15, 2010 just east of Fort Atkinson in 2010.
The entire region is filled with lakes, marshes and rivers and lies at the southwestern tip of the Kettle Moraine State Forest, Southern Unit. A few miles north of Jefferson and about 15 miles northeast of Deerfield is the restored ancient Mississippian village now known as Aztalan State Park with many ancient mounds, some of them flat pyramids. Nearby Rock Lake, Lake Ripley and Red Cedar Lake have all been rumored to harbor lake monsters, and a lane east of Jefferson called Paradise Road is a local spook lane where a large, winged humanoid was spotted in 2005.
In fact, my 2006 book Hunting the American Werewolf calls out a 13-square-mile area I dubbed the Jefferson Square of Weirdness because of these anomalies and more, concentrated in such a small area. Deerfield Township lies just west of my imagined square. It includes several small lakes and marshes which are present in a high percentage of anomalous creatures – but of course also provide hunting habitat for other predators.
I do NOT mean to imply that I think Bigfoot attacked Stelpflug’s horse. Bigfoot would, after all, have left those famed, ginormous tracks. Something canine seems more likely, although it would need to be a very large canine. The snow-prints from whatever it was have already disappeared due to a few days of unseasonal high temperatures, but I am hoping someone took pictures.
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