The bar at the Smoke Rise Village Inn in Kinnelon last week was buzzing with talk  about a big cat. A really big cat. 

“It was as long as a deer with no ears and a long snaky tail,” said a friend who nearly ran down the creature one night last month. Then, to her shock and horror, she saw the huge animal maul and kill her neighbor’s beloved house cat.
 
Others at the bar quickly chimed in. There was one more witness to another sighting. The  mountain lion—that’s what everybody believed it to be—was spotted skulking along a road, and in a driveway. Nearly everyone around the bar had heard of the Kinnelon cougar, or knew someone who’d seen the animal.

Smoke Rise (www.smokerise-nj.com) is vast and upscale—a gated community bordering thousands of acres of undeveloped Highlands. Bears are commonplace. Residents trade their black bear photos like baseball cards. Coyotes live there, too.  

But mountain lions? Our friend snapped a photo of the big cat’s paw print, knowing that her story would need to be documented.  Smoke Rise security sent over a patrol, but at last check the experts have not responded.

New Jersey’s coyotes arrived a few decades ago from their original habitat out West. Mountain lions (they’re also called cougars or pumas) have been expanding in our direction too. But they have not reached beyond the Great Plains,  wildlife experts say (www.easterncougar.org). Official word from the state Division of Fish and Wildlife (www.nj.gov/dep/fgw/index.htm) is that there is no native New Jersey cougar population. 

Still, for years there have been sightings (Google: http://tinyurl.com/32xtle). Don Freiday, a naturalist with New Jersey Audubon and expert tracker, went to check one big cat rumor in the Sourland Mountains of Central Jersey ten years ago, and found a footprint left by what he is convinced was a mountain lion.

Biologists say any puma wandering in New Jersey is an escapee—some people keep them as pets.  Small comfort to the residents of Smoke Rise who are keeping their pets inside, and hoping this really big cat stays away.