Public Forum

Laughing At Ghosts In Maine Woods

John Richardson followed up his earlier article on the eastern panther survey with a short column on March 24, 2007, entitled “Seeing ‘ghosts’ in the Maine woods.” Today’s commentary has the classic framework of beginning and ending paragraphs, which in typical journalistic style, are used to bring balance into the tone of the article: For an animal that’s supposed to be extinct in the eastern United States, mountain lions have sure been getting around the Maine woods….So if you think you’ve seen a mountain lion, you aren’t crazy. You may not even be wrong. And you certainly are not alone.John [...]

Do Cellphones Advance Cryptid Photography?

Remember what people said when little cameras showed up on mobile telephones? The notion was that with so many digital cameras out there on cellphones, there would be more chances to capture cryptids photograhically and visually, thus adding a new level of technology to the quest. Okay, for all those folks that wanted to have more cryptid photo images taken by cellphones, here, above, is what you get! As I walked out the door I thought “hang on a minute”. It looked like a cat but it was a lot bigger. It was definitely a cat. It walked like one [...]

Eastern Puma Survey Media Analysis

A copyright-free image of the cougar from Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911. Do eastern pumas exist? Are they an endangered species? Should these “ghost cats” be removed from the endangered species list? Are the eastern subspecies actually different from the western subspecies? These are a few of the questions that the United States federal government will answer by the end of the year, they promise. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced some time ago it is formally reviewing the status of the eastern mountain lion to determine if the felid should stay on the [...]