The cougar (Puma concolor) holds the Guinness world record for the mammal with the most names. It has more than 40 names in English alone, including mountain lion, puma, panther, ghost cat, deer tiger, and painter. English settlers used the name catamount (from cat of the mountain) since at least 1664.
The word cougar comes from the Tupi-Guaraní language of Brazil, guaçu ara. In English this word became cuguar, and finally cougar. However, puma is the most commonly used name in both Latin America and Europe today. Mountain lion is commonly used in the United States, and cougar is often used in Canada. Panthers are found in Florida, where they are sometimes also called painters.
Whatever its name, the catamount is the most widely distributed cat in the world, ranging from the Canadian Yukon to southern Chile. There used to be catamounts in our area. (Imagine a cougar in what is now your backyard.) When Europeans first settled our shores, the mountain lion was the most wide-ranging mammal in the western hemisphere. In 1634, William Wood wrote:
Concerning Lyons, I will not say that I ever saw any my selfe, but some affirme that they have seene a Lyon at Cape Anne which is not above six leagues from Boston: some likewise being lost in woods, have heard such terrible roarings, as have made them much agast; which must eyther be Devills or Lyons; there being no other creatures which use to roare saving Beares, which have not such a terrible kind of roaring: besides, Plimouth men have traded for Lyons skinnes.
In actuality, mountain lions do not have the long, thick vocal cords needed to roar. They have vocal cords much like those of domestic cats, and make similar sounds (purrs, hisses, growls). They also make a chirping sound, and during mating season, a terrifying screech, described in the Cambridge Chronicle of 1898 as “a cry so unearthly and weird that even a man of the stoutest heart will start in affright; a cry that can only be likened to a scream of demoniac laughter.” The screech carries up to a mile. Females screech to attract males, and males screech to stake out a territory and warn rivals to stay away.
Mountain lions preferred prey is deer, and we certainly have a glut of white-tailed deer in the region. These cats are ambush predators, meaning they stalk their prey, and then leap onto its back, biting the neck, and quickly dispatching it. They do not generally chase prey. Mountain lions kill one deer about every week or two. They have powerful legs, and can jump from the ground 18 feet into a tree or leap across a 40-foot ravine.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service states that cougars at one time, “lived in every Eastern state in a variety of habitats.” Their population was stable for thousands of years. However, soon after European settlers arrived, they began to decimate the mountain lion population. Although these cats’ favored prey in the east was white-tailed deer, these big cats also sometimes preyed on domestic sheep, goats, or other livestock. Some states put bounties on dead mountain lions. A hunter near Mount Tom killed the last mountain lion in Massachusetts in 1858. A hunter trapped the last in the northeast in Maine in 1938.
But are there catamounts in Massachusetts today? In 1997, a professional tracker found large scat (nearly an inch wide and a foot long) at the Quabbin Reservoir. Nearby he found the remains of a beaver carcass covered in leaves and soil (a cache) nearly eight feet long. Two different labs (one in New York and one in Maryland) used DNA analysis to confirm that the scat came from a mountain lion.
Then in March 2011, a DCR forester photographed large tracks in the snow at the Quabbin Reservoir. Experts in Massachusetts, Virginia, Vermont, and Wyoming confirmed that the footprints belonged to a mountain lion. In June of that same year, an SUV killed a young male mountain lion on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut. Many experts believed that this was the same mountain lion that had been 100 miles north near the Quabbin in March.
Scientists analyzed the dead cat’s scat, hair, and blood. They also examined trail camera photos, scat, and hair samples from across the nation. They determined that this cat had traveled 1,800 miles from South Dakota to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, New York and then finally to Massachusetts and Connecticut. All in a year and a half!
This cat was a lone male. Although no female mountain lions have yet reached Massachusetts, it seems clear that they eventually will, as western mountain lions are migrating in our direction. In March 2025, a photographer captured the first mountain lion cubs in 100 years in Michigan. So far, breeding mountain lions have not reached farther east, but scientists expect them to be here by the end of the century.
It’s possible they could arrive even sooner. A group of citizens in Vermont is trying to get permission to reintroduce mountain lions there.
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