There are no wild mountain lions living in New Hampshire. Yes, you’re heard that they’re lurking in our woods, and maybe you’ve got a hunter friend who has a hunter friend who swears he’s seen one. But we’ve been looking for years, and the lack of footprints/scat/hair and particularly of photos now that the woods are full of game cameras makes it clear: They’re not here.
I say this because Nova Scotia has just reached the same conclusion as Motherboard reports.
The search for cougars involved a series of lures—what he described as “50-ml Nalgene bottles” containing cougar urine—placed strategically around the park, with some Velcro or barbed wire nearby. If a cougar approached to check out the scent, the idea was that some of their hair would get caught, and be sent off for DNA analysis. The researchers did retrieve some hair that they sent off for tests, but none came back positive for cougar.
It would be cool – although also a bit scary – if cougars were here in the Northeast. But they’re not.
Yet.
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