Confirmed Mountain Lion Sightings: Are Big Cats Returning to Tennessee?
7 hours ago
At one time, they were plentiful. They were strong, sleek, and dangerous—an apex predator. By the early 1900s, the mountain lion, also called a cougar, panther, or puma, was completely eradicated from Tennessee. New sightings, however, have a lot of people asking: is this elusive big cat returning to the Volunteer State?
Many researchers believe that mountain lions have been poised to make a comeback east of the Mississippi River for years. Sightings across the midwest have increased over the past decade, and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) has confirmed several sightings in Tennessee.
In 2015, the TWRA announced that they had confirmed the first sighting of a mountain lion in the state of Tennessee in over 100 years. It was taken in Obion County and confirmed with a trail cam photo. Over the next year, nine more trail cam photos and videos were confirmed by TWRA. Here they are:
9/20/2015 Obion County, Trail camera photo submitted by a landowner
Although no sightings have been confirmed by the TWRA since 2016, many of the accounts found online are fascinating and seem very credible. If you'd like to read some personal accounts of mountain lion sightings, a great place to visit is "Cougar Sightings in West Tennesseee." The page is maintained by the biology department of Union University and has sightings that range from 2024 all the way back to 2002. After reading some of these sightings, you may understand why some people believe that mountain lions never left the state!
The mountain lion is a protected species. It is illegal to kill a mountain lion in Tennessee except in the case of imminent threat of life and injury. From the TWRA website at TN.gov.
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I saw a Bob cat in broad daylight, distance about 60 feet, Patterson Road Rockvale, TN about 2022. He killed 4 of 6 ground hogs on my property. I did not see the kills directly.
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