Mountain Lions in New Hampshire-Fact or Fiction

By Eric Orff

The supervisor that hired me in the game division in October of 1978 passed on to me this whole big folder of mountain lion information and sightings going back probably a couple decades.

Out of the hundreds of sightings, have we ever proven any? The answer is no. Could we have a mountain lion? Absolutely. You know, I've worked with wildlife for my whole life. Nothing is out of the realm of possibility. So in fact, maybe a decade ago now there was a mountain lion killed in Connecticut and through DNA analysis of that mountain lion and scat that had been left in various places. It was determined that Mountain Lion came from the Dakotas across the Northern part of our country through New York, where there was evidence and it ended up getting killed in Connecticut. So could it happen? Absolutely. I mean, I have been on the phone with people that describe a mountain line to a T and I just can't figure it out. We just don't have any. I tell people we don't have any physical evidence that we could take to a court, DNA samples, scat samples, or kill tracks, uh, you know, and we've tried.

Learn more about the history of Mountain Lions in NH

The Mountain Lion photo at the top of the page is from the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center in Holderness, NH. Visit their page on Mountain Lions at https://www.nhnature.org/visit/animal_info_sheets/mountain_lion.php