The third time was definitely not the charm – at least for the cougar.
The big cat with two confirmed sightings in the past month is likely the same one that was recently killed in a remote area of Hunt County about 50 miles northeast of Dallas, officials said.
“Texas Parks and Wildlife Department suspects this may be the same lion that was seen and photographed near Princeton in late November and early December near Princeton,” said Megan Radke, a Texas Parks and Wildlife spokesperson.
The cougar was shot and killed by a licensed hunter on private property a few miles west of Celeste in northeast Texas, said Hunt County Game Warden Gary Miller, Jr.
“The cat came to his deer food bowl,” Miller said, adding that the mountain lion preys on deer.
The lion was an older adult male weighing about 160 pounds.
“It was six feet long from the tip of its tail to its head,” said Miller.
Mountain lions are not classified as wild in Texas, and there are no seasonal restrictions on their killing or harvesting.
The news quickly spread on social media, leaving some nature lovers unhappy.
“I was heartbroken to learn about the mountain lion that was shot and killed outside Celeste, Texas,” said Karin Saucedo, a wildlife photographer and advocate.
“We should work to protect these rarely seen native cats from rampant and unrestricted killing rather than instilling unnecessary fear that a target puts on their back,” said Saucedo.
“Terrible news, but this outcome was probably inevitable, unfortunately,” said Chris Jackson, who runs a popular website and Facebook page called DFW Urban Wildlife.
Jackson was one of the first experts to confirm the sighting of a cougar in Rowlett, a few days after a walking camera took a photo of the cat last month.
He inspected the cougar’s tracks, “in soft, wet sand just south of where the cat’s videos were shot,” he said. He also shared his photos with a tracking expert who verified the prints.
Rowlett residents Stephanie Higgins and her boyfriend, Logan Aduddell, had set up a tracking camera on the edge of his estate near Lake Ray Hubbard, where they typically saw bobcats and coyotes. At around 4 a.m. on Sunday, November 22, a cougar strolled past the camera.
Later that day, Higgins posted the video to her Facebook site, with the caption “Big Cat in Town !!”
State biologist Sam Kieschnick said last month that there was more than enough evidence from the video and the tracks found by Jackson to confirm that the animal was indeed a mountain lion.
Kieschnick said sightings of a cougar are so rare in North Texas that it has taken on a mysterious, almost mystical nature, similar to the Bigfoot of North Central Texas. The Rowlett sighting was the first confirmed report of a Dallas County mountain lion in modern history.
After Higgins’ camera recording, the lion was then spotted on December 7 in Princeton, about 20 miles north of Rowlett. A Facebook post from Texas Parks and Wildlife said Thursday the department confirmed photos taken Monday of a mountain lion near Princeton, in Collin County.
Earlier this month, the Hood County sheriff’s office said it suspected a cougar was responsible for the death of a 28-year-old man near Lipan, about 137 miles west of Dallas. But the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department disagreed, saying in a written statement that game wardens and other experts found no evidence that “indicates an attack by a cougar or other wild animal.”
Mountain lions are mostly found in parts of west and south Texas, Radke said. The last and only other confirmed sighting of cougars in northeast Texas was in 2018, in Grayson County along the Oklahoma border, Radke said.
‘Cheering on the Lion’
“I was really cheering the lion as he navigated the gauntlet of every deer stall with a hunter behind it,” said Ben Sandifer, an accountant and naturalist in Dallas and a staunch advocate of wilderness conservation.
There had been many false sightings over the years, making the confirmed report of a cougar in the Dallas area all the more exciting to read about, Sandifer said.
Mountain lions are one of the few animals that are equal or larger in physical stature than humans, he noted. “When you see one, you quickly realize that you are not the apex predator at that point,” he said.
“I was so excited. It seemed like the real deal, life of the country,” he said. “But then I was so discouraged to see someone killed it.”
According to Sandifer, the area where the cat was killed a few miles west of Celeste is a very rugged area – one of the last in the region to be inhabited by pioneers in the 19th century.
The site is located about 40 miles northeast of Rowlett and 20 miles northeast of Princeton, where the lion was last seen. It was just the kind of remote area favored by cougars, who are extremely reclusive, Sandifer said.
“Unfortunately, we are in the middle of the deer season,” he said. “And every deer park has a gun in it.”