There was one other cougar photographed simply outdoors of Thunder Bay, Ont.
On Monday night, an grownup cougar confirmed up on path digicam owned by Adam Massaro.
Massaro mentioned he usually has quite a lot of lynx on his property, positioned 5 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay in Kaministiquia, however he had by no means seen a cougar.
“I used to be strolling all the way down to examine my path cam [Wednesday night],” Massaro mentioned, “and I seen the cat tracks within the snow they usually regarded fairly a bit larger than a lynx. So I despatched an image of them to my fiance as a joke and mentioned ‘perhaps there’s a cougar round’ and I checked the digicam and yup, that is what it was.”
Massaro mentioned there’s a good likelihood the cougar was searching for deer on his property, the place he has a mineral block and a few alfalfa out to feed the deer close to the path digicam.
There are additionally typically fairly a couple of snowshoe hare displaying on his digicam, Massaro added.
“It regarded just like the cat might need bought a rabbit, nevertheless it was laborious to make sure,” he mentioned. “It hung round for six minutes.”
Massaro mentioned the cougar was just below 300 metres from his home.
“It truly walked near my home,” he mentioned. “It walked down the path from my looking stand space, then will need to have seen the home and took a 90 into the bush.”
Massaro shared practically a dozen of the path digicam images of the cougar with CBC Information.
The cat seems round 8:31 p.m. on Monday, and continues to be hanging round at 8:36 p.m. The cougar is massive, wholesome and in a number of photographs appears to be yawning.
There was a flurry of cougar exercise round Thunder Bay over the previous few months.
In November, two footage of a cougar mentioned to be from a path digicam close to Lappe, a group northwest of Thunder Bay, made the rounds on social media, however they have been unattributed.
Massaro mentioned these pics from November have been apparently taken not removed from his residence.
On Dec. 31, Chris Maley had a cougar seem on his path digicam positioned close to his residence off Freeway 61, southwest of Thunder Bay.
The 15-second video was clear and confirmed a big, mature cougar.
Whereas Maley’s cougar video and Massaro’s path cam footage are uncommon confirmed examples, the presence of cougars within the northwest has been established.
On March 25, 2017, the carcass of a cougar was discovered frozen in a snowbank on Boreal Highway, northwest of Thunder Bay. The animal was emaciated and had probably died attributable to hunger. That cougar had numerous porcupine quills in its snout, mouth and throat. It was the primary confirmed wild cougar carcass present in Ontario.
The Ontario Ministry of Pure Sources and Forestry seized the carcass and had the animal examined. The DNA outcomes confirmed it was carefully associated to animals from the area of the Black Hills of Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska.
The ministry mentioned on the time that the animal discovered lifeless was not a part of a resident cougar inhabitants in northern Ontario.
Cougars are thought-about an endangered species within the province.
