For the past 50 years, a staple of Tony Leavitt’s autumns has been deer hunting, setting up camp in a sequestered tree stand in the pre-dawn hours. “I’ve never been afraid of just walking out there,” he said.
But the Iolan admitted he may have to talk himself into entering a secluded area by himself this year.
“I’ve probably had to have a little bit of a therapy session with myself,” he chuckled, “to convince myself there’s nothing out there.”
That’s because Leavitt’s trail camera snapped a photo of a large cat roaming across a parcel of land about a mile south of LaHarpe Oct. 9. The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks has confirmed it was a mountain lion.
“It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck when I saw the pictures,” Leavitt told the Register.
In all likelihood, the animal is the same one spotted four days later, on Friday, on a security camera on the outskirts of Parsons, roughly 40 miles to the south, a KDWP official said.
“We don’t know for sure that it is the same — they all look quite a bit alike — but the lion in both of those photos appears lean,” noted Matt Peek, a wildlife research biologist with Wildlife and Parks. “And when you haven’t had any confirmations, and suddenly you get two just a few days apart, it leads us to believe this was probably the same lion in Allen County.”
MOUNTAIN lions are known to leave their natal homes and travel hundreds of miles to find a new place to settle, “and they’ll just take out across the landscape,” Peek said.
When traveling, lions can cover more than five miles in a day, “although those numbers can change,” Peek said.
While the state has reported 60 confirmed mountain lion sightings since 2007, confirmations in southeast Kansas are rare.
That said, the animal’s numbers are generally increasing in numbers across the western United States.
Additionally, biologists have reported “reproducing populations” as close as Nebraska, Peek said.
Peek said he fielded a report of a possible second sighting of a mountain lion in Allen County this month, although further review confirmed the animal to be a domestic cat.
LEAVITT sets up several motion-triggered cameras each fall to try to determine what sort of deer population he can target once hunting season opens.
“What’s funny is the night before I commented to my son that it didn’t seem like we had many deer pictures that day,” Leavitt said.
