“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Lynn Morris of East Bare Hill Road. About 1:30 on the afternoon of January 12, while looking out a window of her home, she saw a large, cat-like creature in her driveway. She described the animal as “somewhat larger than a German shepherd, but clearly a cat.”
Dick Cronin of Hillcrest Drive, a superintendent of the Bureau of Research and Management of the State Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, told the Post there had been many reports of sightings of a large wild cat in the Harvard-Bolton-Lancaster area. However, he reported, scientists in his agency are divided in their opinions of whether it could be a cougar and if cougars existed at all in Massachusetts.
“It’s amazing with the amount of sightings reported that one hasn’t been killed by a car or reported dead by natural causes,” Cronin said.
Based on reports in the old Harvard Post.
Editor’s note: The eastern cougar was declared extinct in 2011 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
