For those who have long pooh-poohed the idea of a mountain lion roaming around North Texas, chew on this.
A Rowlett woman recently posted on her Facebook page a trail camera video of a mountain lion walking down a dirt road at night. The spooky image showed a big cat with a long tail that touched the ground, a feature that distinguishes it from a bobcat for which the mountain lion is commonly mistaken.
Stephanie Higgins and her boyfriend, Logan Aduddell, had set up the trail camera on the edge of his property near Lake Ray Hubbard, where they typically saw bobcats and coyotes. But at about 4 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 22, a mountain lion strolled past the camera.
A few hours later that morning they looked at the video. “We reviewed it a couple of times and came to the conclusion it was a mountain lion based on the size and how long the tail was,” Higgins said.
Later that day, Higgins posted the video on her Facebook site, with the caption “Big kitty in the city!!”
Chris Jackson, who runs a popular website and Facebook page called DFW Urban Wildlife, confirmed that he later inspected the mountain lion’s tracks. He found them “in soft wet sand just south of where the videos of the cat were recorded,” he said. He also shared his photos with a tracking expert who verified the prints.
Bobcats are often mistaken for mountain lions, but the latter are much larger and have long tails that touch the ground. Bobcats have short tails no more than 6 inches in length.
“I’m about as convinced as I can be without seeing the cat myself,” Jackson said. “The video appears to be legitimate, and the tracks were found in close proximity,” he said.
An urban wildlife biologist from Texas Parks and Wildlife visited the site Monday to try to confirm the sighting but couldn’t find the tracks, which likely were washed away by recent rains.
But the state biologist, Sam Kieschnick, said there’s more than enough evidence from the video and the tracks found by Jackson, whose photos were looked at and confirmed as mountain lion tracks by TPW experts.
Kieschnick is aware that a mountain lion sighting is so rare in North Texas that it’s acquired a mysterious, almost mystical nature, akin to “the Bigfoot of North Central Texas,” he said.
“My standard M.O. is to treat all these reports with skepticism,” he said. “But I can definitely say this is verifiable,” Kieschnick said Monday.
It’s likely the mountain lion is a young adult male on the prowl for a suitable environment with plenty of food, typically deer.
“This species needs a large swath of wilderness,” Kieschnick said. “I predict it’s going to be on the move looking for that.”
Since 2005, Jackson has been investigating the possibility of mountain lions in the North Texas region. He’s only been able to confirm two instances near the DFW area. One was near Glen Rose in 2014, which was the subject of a story in The News. The other was near Mineral Wells in 2018, when a mountain lion was hit by a vehicle on Highway 337.
Texas Parks and Wildlife keeps track of mountain lion sightings throughout the state. A map of confirmed reports shows one in Grayson County, which Kieschnick said was from 2018.
Since 2011, nearly 300 mountain lion sightings have been reported to Parks and Wildlife from all over the state. Most could not be confirmed and only a fraction verified.
Though they once roamed all over Texas, mountain lions are now found mostly in West Texas in the Trans Pecos region. There are also pockets of the animals in South Texas, the Panhandle, Hill Country and East Texas where Texas wildlife officials have confirmed sightings.
Another woman near the DalRock neighborhood in Rowlett said she had seen what she thought was a mountain lion jump into her backyard early Sunday morning, Nov. 22, after she had returned from a quick trip to a RaceTrac gas station.
“I was shocked,” said Jovon Humphrey, a mother of five children who lives in Rowlett.
About 12:45 a.m. that Sunday, Humphrey was sitting in her car finishing up a call when she saw the cat stroll down her driveway, past her car and jump over the chain link fence into her backyard.
“Oh my gosh, there’s a whole lion in my backyard,” she said out loud. “I was trying to remain calm so as not to call attention to myself,” she said. But she let out a muffled shriek. The cat paused and looked back at her. For a few, frightening moments, she held her breath. Then the cat turned back and ambled off into the darkness.
Humphrey never saw it again. Later that day, she posted a comment on a Rowlett community Facebook page to warn others of what she’d seen. She said she also called the Rowlett police. A specialist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife later talked to her.
Higgins said she and her boyfriend set up the trail camera just “to see the stuff that’s behind our house,” which has included packs of coyote and bobcats.
“People lose their dogs, and sometimes we’ll see them on the camera, and we’re able to tell them they were in our area at a certain time,” she said.
She said someone commented on her Facebook post that they thought they had seen the cat crossing Highway 66 a few hours before her camera got its picture, which meant the creature was heading south in the direction of Miller Road at the time.
Higgins said she didn’t want to share their property address because of concerns about curiosity seekers or folks who wanted to hunt down the cat. Several comments on the Facebook post indicated that people wanted to bring their hunting dogs to the area or set up deer blinds to see if the cat appears again.
“I think they should just leave him alone,” said Higgins, who works in the construction industry and is also a hunter.
“There’s no point in trying to capture him and relocate him given the fact that they travel 40-80 miles,” she said. “It’d be one thing if we saw them frequently but we see them rarely.”
