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Icy_Comparison148 t1_jam8b18 wrote

Reply to comment by Lizdance40 in Mountain Lion Spotted in Hartford! by DarthLysergis

Not for nothing, but maybe they have? I mean a black mountain lion would be pretty surprising. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods in New England, I have seen one mountain lion, 23 years ago, in southern Vermont. We were driving home from the first fast and furious movie in the theaters lol. But yeah, people are constantly mistaking foxes here for almost anything they could imagine.

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Icy_Comparison148 t1_jamleit wrote

Yeah bobcats have a vastly different appearance than mountain lions. People get excited when they see movement of something larger than normal and tend to have trouble interpreting what they see. I feel like the black panther /mountain lion thing is some Granby folklore. I’m not familiar with the video from Colorado you are talking about, anybody that’s so freaked out by an animal in their yard in Colorado is probably not going to be able to reliably identify it. When I used Nextdoor in our neighborhood their would regularly be phots of a mangy fox that people were freaked by, it happened to be the same one that built a den under my barn… It’s interesting here, I live close by to Granby in North Canton. I have had the opportunity to observe more animals here than anywhere I have lived. Had a family of foxes last summer and the local bobcat appears to be pregnant, but those guys will be impossible to see.

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Lizdance40 t1_jamuxsh wrote

I've spent the past 2 hours looking for that bobcat video. 😂. Maybe she got tired of the embarrassment and finally took it down.

If you're in North Canton you're not far away. Keep your eyes open every once in a while the moose goes through and I would think your neck of the woods would be remote enough. My son actually has a picture of the moose in a pond which is less than a mile from our house. The last moose that spent any time in Granby unfortunately also had brainworm and eventually deteriorated and d e e p came and put it down. ☹️.

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Lizdance40 t1_jamc9ik wrote

It's probably a bobcat or a coyote. Both of which are common in New England and can be melanistic. Although there's never been a truly black bobcat, they do occur to be quite dark. But both bobcat and coyote have the gene for that mountain lions do not.

There is a YouTube video which may have been taken down. This woman gets her gun because she swears there's a mountain lion in her yard in Colorado I think. She swears up and down it's a mountain lion and she's going to go out and either shoot it or scare it off. As she approaches this cat sitting in her yard it gets scared enough to get up and take off and at that point you can see it's a bobcat. Slightly tufted ears, and a bobtail, and clearly very small compared to a mountain lion. She turned off comments

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