Man Claims To Have Proof Of Mountain Lions In Upstate New York

From the Watertown Daily Times:
MASSENA — The state Department of Environmental Conservation insists there is not a mountain lion population in New York.

Massena’s Donald J. Lucas believes otherwise, and said he has hair and plaster paw prints to prove there are not one, but two in the Massena area.

On Thursday, Mr. Lucas said, he heard of a sighting of a mountain lion off Route 37 and within an hour he was in the woods. He carried a camera, a bottle of water and two quarts of plaster to make plaster casts of any tracks he could find.

“We had a foot of wet, packy snow and the tracks were not hard to find. I started to backtrack from where I found the tracks to determine where the cat had come from,” Mr. Lucas said. “What surprised me was when I came to a spot where two cats had been walking together, but had gone in two different directions. I had been following a large set. The new ones were large but a little smaller, so I decided to follow them.”

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