I know that there is always a controversy about animals in the wild that are supposed to be extinct but show up every now and then. I live in along the Cherokee/Smith county border where there is a lot of woods, water, grasslands and brush. There are the usual coyote, fox and bobcat around and I have seen lion tracks based on my experience with them in the California mountains. But, there is some kind of feline that shows up occasionally in the middle of the night making all kinds of strange sounds and leaves tracks that are something between a bobcat and lion in size and pad shape. I have never seen it but, after 60 years in the woods from California to Michigan, I have never heard sounds like this.

Any chance of jaguarundi still being around?

Before you laugh, I ridiculed a friend of my son many years ago when he insisted he saw a wolverine in the Sierra Nevada near Donner Lake near the California/Nevada border. I told him there was no way a wolverine could be in that area. About 10 years later the California Fish and Game followed up on repeat sightings and documented a number of these rare critters right where Adam told me he saw them.

Not sure about the jaguarundi; maybe its just a chupacabra

I’m fairly certain I saw one on the Kennedy Ranch shoreline a few years back.


Prepare to be ridiculed by the expert

Well, I am 74 so I am pretty familiar with ridicule

I had to look it up, kinda freaky looking

On my children, 2 years ago I saw a large black cat north a Abeilene. I'm not sure what it was, but it's tail was 3 ft long and had some serious muscles.

What were the sounds like?

Has there ever been a sighting outside of far south Texas?

Squatch make crazy sounds.

Not questioning your tracking ability at all, but how many prints have you seen in a series?

I ask because sometimes if you're only able to get one or two clear prints from a cat the size can get misrepresented by a double step; the back pad is stepping into the same track the front foot made and this would make the size look a little questionable or odd.

You can usually sort that out if you have a series of tracks versus just picking up one or two in some mud in otherwise a rocky area or vegetated area for example where you don't get a series of track.

How to say you are married without saying you are married.

https://pictures-of-cats.org/texas-mountain-lion.html

probably more likely a mountain lion that jaguarundi.

MO

Are you confused with a Coatimundi? Not that unusual in South Texas.

Jaguarundi aren't"still around" because they have never been around there. There have only been 5 documented jaguarundi in Texas. The. Last one was in 1986 and all 5 were in 2 counties in the very southern tip of Texas. They require a very specific habitat.

Plus #1.

I have actually seen one years ago at the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, down in the Valley. We were sneaking in to lay in on a crossing, from Mexico, to catch some smugglers. It was at about evening twilight. no sun, but not quite dark.