With all the mountain lion talk who’s seen them?

[sxs]

I HAVE A PIC OF ONE TAKEN BY TRAIL CAM IN 2017 BURLINGTON COUNTY BUT ITS ON MY EMAIL AND I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MOVE IT TO ZOOM BROWSER SO I CAN POST IT HERE

[nmc02]

1 hour ago, steve zignorski said:

 

[68Ioweu1]

I know the minuscule chance exists but do you guys really believe a moutain lion is running around the state. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of trail cams deployed throughout the state. 
 

there are however bobcats...

unless real proof other than some grainy or doctored cam pics I will never believe it. 
 

and yes I am aware of the lion killed on 84 in Connecticut with South Dakota tags. 

[Gobblengrunt]

There are no mountain lions in NJ!!  Nobody has ever recorded a track, scat, kill site, CLEAR pic, or video.  Every sighting is like a Bigfoot sighting, eyes playing tricks on you!  If you’ve ever actually seen a mountain lion, they are a big animal.  There would be no question what you’ve seen if one was actually sighted.  I’ll bet almost all sightings are bobcats and/ or coyotes.  I see bobcats weekly.  Some look really huge but in reality they probably weighed 30# tops which would be very small for a mountain lion.

[Bucndoe]

The lack of knowledge for wildlife identification by those that claim they spend alot of time in the woods is ridiculous

[birdshotnj]

The only mountain lions in NJ are in the zoo. I wish I had a quarter for every guy thats told me he's seen a mountain lion here. We live in the most densely populated state where everyone has a camera in their pocket and there's not a single picture. Not to mention the thousands of trail cams. Met a guy years ago in flatbrook who started telling me about the time he saw Bigfoot up there. Can't make this stuff up lol

[Bucksnbows]

17 hours ago, mike033089 said:

I figure with the other post going On I’m curious as to if anyone has actually seen one in NJ. My neighbor up the road claimed to see one the other week in their yard (Warren county) near the water gap. And I’ve heard others claim to see them also in town.  

That very simple answer would be no.  There are none, so you can't see what doesn't exist.  On the other thread, one of the posters said he's seen several in Vermont.  Again, wrong.  He may have seen a bobcat or even a lynx, but he didn't see any mountain lions.  

[Sticks n' Stones2]

20 hours ago, mike033089 said:

I figure with the other post going On I’m curious as to if anyone has actually seen one in NJ. My neighbor up the road claimed to see one the other week in their yard (Warren county) near the water gap. And I’ve heard others claim to see them also in town.  

On October 15th, 2018 between 11:15-11:30 A.M. I saw a Mountain lion within 20 yards of me while out deer hunting with my recurve bow, walked right across the trail I was on, no obstructions. The picture I've included was a bobcat that must've been at least 55-60 lbs that I saw last summer, the cat I saw in October was easily close to 3 times the size of it, not to mention it has longer legs, light short than hair, flat face, fat stocky  legs, big wide paws, long muscular body, and a thick long tail which half of it was tucked between it's hind legs with the other half curving upwards with a charcoal black tip on the end. 

I was creeping down into this valley along a virtually clean trail, and after walking some 75 yards to my left I noticed the whitish colored antler tips of a buck tucked under a bluff off the left of the trail, the bluff was about 12 yards away and I only made it 10 feet before two bucks, a 6-8 pointer and a 4 pointer jumped out and ran some 15 yards down the trail and stood there staring in my direction, there bums were facing me so I didn't have a shot in my mind. To my right there was a ridge that followed this trail for the next 100 yards until another holler so I figured I'd backtrack try to drop an arrow into one of them from up there, at this point I was crouching behind a log and was about to turn around when I heard some twigs snap behind me and low and behold I saw the animal I had described above, since mountain lion is such a satanic word to state in NJ I'll refer to it as the "animal", this animal pretty much followed my exact plan, it hopped onto the ridge line and began trotting in the direction that the two bucks, who at this point had wandered further down the tail, I got a second look at the cat from about 30 feet I'd say from seeing it up on the ridge. After spending a couple minutes processing the event I realized I saw a big cat, excuse me animal similar to the big cats I had seen just a couple years ago from my second trip to Kenya where I got a fair idea of the size and movements of big cats seeing them from 1 yard and 100 yards away in a 4x4. I called up my dad and some friends telling them to call the police or something if I didn't call them back within the next 30 minutes and proceeded to jog back home looking back every minute or so with a knocked broadhead on my bow and my at an easy place to grab on my belt if that animal decided to go after a different kind of quarry, luckily he I presume from the size was more interested in venison.

I asked a local farmer in the area who swore up and down that he saw one cross the road in front of his house, a mere 30 yards from the road, and interestingly enough a couple months or so before this my dad was leaving for work at 3 A.M. and he heard this loud scream and a crash to the ground from an old Oak tree in the in a thicket some 80 feet from our house, he didn't think much of it at first but after my encounter with the animal, he was looking through cat sounds and heard something that he swore sounded exactly like the scream he heard, it was the mating scream a female mountain lion makes when in heat. While this might not have much relevance there was a sharp decline in the coyote population in our territory around a 2 square mile area of private land that we have access to. Finally I did infact contact Fish and Game about the matter and some woman I talked to told me I saw a house cat and hung up, rather unprofessional behavior in my opinion, however I'm sure they constantly get false sightings so I can somewhat sympathize with her frustration.

We did find a Beech tree within 75 yards of where I sighted it that was a scratching post, it was too tall to be bobact, but the claws weren't wide enough for bear, I'll have to go through my dad's phone and find it.

For anyone who's going to ask why I didn't take a picture (I also had a flip phone back then that I had turned off the whole encounter probably lasted 30-45 seconds, it took almost 30 seconds to turn it on, either way even if I had though to take a picture I wouldn't have been realistically possible), I was a scared 17 year old and was just frozen in awe more than anything, before then I had seen every animal in person besides a fisher that wandered in those woods, never before until that day had I seen that critter.

Edited January 20, 2021 by Sticks n' Stones2

[NotJust22s]

18 hours ago, sxs said:

I HAVE A PIC OF ONE TAKEN BY TRAIL CAM IN 2017 BURLINGTON COUNTY BUT ITS ON MY EMAIL AND I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MOVE IT TO ZOOM BROWSER SO I CAN POST IT HERE

 

14 minutes ago, Sticks n' Stones2 said:

On October 15th, 2018 between 11:15-11:30 A.M. I saw a Mountain lion within 20 yards of me while out deer hunting with my recurve bow, walked right across the trail I was on, no obstructions. The picture I've included was a bobcat that must've been at least 55-60 lbs that I saw last summer, the cat I saw in October was easily close to 3 times the size of it, not to mention it has longer legs, light short than hair, flat face, fat stocky  legs, big wide paws, long muscular body, and a thick long tail which half of it was tucked between it's hind legs with the other half curving upwards with a charcoal black tip on the end. 

I highly recommend you not take any mind altering drugs prior to entering the woods. JMO 

[Sticks n' Stones2]

6 minutes ago, NotJust22s said:

 

I highly recommend you not take any mind altering drugs prior to entering the woods. JMO 

Okie dokie

[NotJust22s]

Although my neighbor did get this last year.

 

[sxs]

8 minutes ago, NotJust22s said:

 

I highly recommend you not take any mind altering drugs prior to entering the woods. JMO 

STICKS THERE ARE A LOT OF EXPERTS ON THIS SITE AND THEY ALL HOLD THIER OWN OPINIONS IN HIGH REGARD ...MOST OF THE REST OF US USE  THESE DURING THE TP SHORTAGE  JMO

[Tarhunt]

19 hours ago, 3Blade said:

Ran in front of my truck the other day

It looks like you're driving off of a cliff. 

[FeniQuest217]

2 hours ago, Bucksnbows said:

That very simple answer would be no.  There are none, so you can't see what doesn't exist.  On the other thread, one of the posters said he's seen several in Vermont.  Again, wrong.  He may have seen a bobcat or even a lynx, but he didn't see any mountain lions.  

just goes to show besides experience in the woods but also simple knowledge.  Google things folks lol "There are no mountain lions in New Jersey, only Bobcats which are considered endangered."

[FeniQuest217]

35 minutes ago, Sticks n' Stones2 said:

On October 15th, 2018 between 11:15-11:30 A.M. I saw a Mountain lion within 20 yards of me while out deer hunting with my recurve bow, walked right across the trail I was on, no obstructions. The picture I've included was a bobcat that must've been at least 55-60 lbs that I saw last summer, the cat I saw in October was easily close to 3 times the size of it, not to mention it has longer legs, light short than hair, flat face, fat stocky  legs, big wide paws, long muscular body, and a thick long tail which half of it was tucked between it's hind legs with the other half curving upwards with a charcoal black tip on the end. 

I was creeping down into this valley along a virtually clean trail, and after walking some 75 yards to my left I noticed the whitish colored antler tips of a buck tucked under a bluff off the left of the trail, the bluff was about 12 yards away and I only made it 10 feet before two bucks, a 6-8 pointer and a 4 pointer jumped out and ran some 15 yards down the trail and stood there staring in my direction, there bums were facing me so I didn't have a shot in my mind. To my right there was a ridge that followed this trail for the next 100 yards until another holler so I figured I'd backtrack try to drop an arrow into one of them from up there, at this point I was crouching behind a log and was about to turn around when I heard some twigs snap behind me and low and behold I saw the animal I had described above, since mountain lion is such a satanic word to state in NJ I'll refer to it as the "animal", this animal pretty much followed my exact plan, it hopped onto the ridge line and began trotting in the direction that the two bucks, who at this point had wandered further down the tail, I got a second look at the cat from about 30 feet I'd say from seeing it up on the ridge. After spending a couple minutes processing the event I realized I saw a big cat, excuse me animal similar to the big cats I had seen just a couple years ago from my second trip to Kenya where I got a fair idea of the size and movements of big cats seeing them from 1 yard and 100 yards away in a 4x4. I called up my dad and some friends telling them to call the police or something if I didn't call them back within the next 30 minutes and proceeded to jog back home looking back every minute or so with a knocked broadhead on my bow and my at an easy place to grab on my belt if that animal decided to go after a different kind of quarry, luckily he I presume from the size was more interested in venison.

I asked a local farmer in the area who swore up and down that he saw one cross the road in front of his house, a mere 30 yards from the road, and interestingly enough a couple months or so before this my dad was leaving for work at 3 A.M. and he heard this loud scream and a crash to the ground from an old Oak tree in the in a thicket some 80 feet from our house, he didn't think much of it at first but after my encounter with the animal, he was looking through cat sounds and heard something that he swore sounded exactly like the scream he heard, it was the mating scream a female mountain lion makes when in heat. While this might not have much relevance there was a sharp decline in the coyote population in our territory around a 2 square mile area of private land that we have access to. Finally I did infact contact Fish and Game about the matter and some woman I talked to told me I saw a house cat and hung up, rather unprofessional behavior in my opinion, however I'm sure they constantly get false sightings so I can somewhat sympathize with her frustration.

We did find a Beech tree within 75 yards of where I sighted it that was a scratching post, it was too tall to be bobact, but the claws weren't wide enough for bear, I'll have to go through my dad's phone and find it.

For anyone who's going to ask why I didn't take a picture (I also had a flip phone back then that I had turned off the whole encounter probably lasted 30-45 seconds, it took almost 30 seconds to turn it on, either way even if I had though to take a picture I wouldn't have been realistically possible), I was a scared 17 year old and was just frozen in awe more than anything, before then I had seen every animal in person besides a fisher that wandered in those woods, never before until that day had I seen that critter.

this cat is JACKED!!