Have You Seen This Cat?

My daughter absolutely insists that she has seen a cougar in our neighborhood. Twice. She is an imaginative creature, my nine year old. But I can usually tell when she is spinning a yarn. On this subject, she is quite sure—and a little scared. She is also an absolute fountain of information on the subject of cats, wild and domestic, since she studied the rare Margay in her class last year and discovered this was her calling. So her description is detailed and involves a lot of taxonomy. I tried to laugh it off as one of those cute things kids says. I joked about how maybe it's Baby from
Bringing Up Baby. She laughed. But then she explained that Baby was a leopard and this one is a cougar—a black cougar. So they can't be the same. She is so sure that's she got me a little spooked.

Then the dogs started acting spooked too. Every evening they ask to go out in the way they do when some trespassing mammal needs chasing off the property. But then they come running back in—terrified—five minutes later. And they proceed to bark at shadows all night like they've had their hides scared off.

When in doubt, do a Google search right? That should settle it. Except it didn't. I found this article from the Star News in February about mysterious cougar sightings in Wilmington.

So, now I have to ask. Has anyone else seen a 50-pound cat skulking around town?