Two Huntsville women living miles apart say they have seen what they called a black “panther” this summer, moving at night in the mountains on the city’s east side.
Authorities say black panthers aren’t known to live in Alabama and there’s an experts’ conversation about whether they exist at all or are dark-coated mutations of mountain lions or other wild cats. Regardless, the Huntsville women, who do not know each other, say there’s at least one big black cat out there now. And if it’s the same cat, it’s covering some ground.
Patti Davis lives on Green Mountain in south Huntsville near the Green Mountain Nature Trail, a 72-acre public park with a walking path around its central lake. She reported June 7 on nextdoor.com that she was up at 7 a.m. looking out over her deck at the nature preserve. “Saw LARGE black animal slinking through the woods. NOT A DOG NOT A BEAR,” she said.
“IMAGE of it is seared into my brain. Looked like a panther,” Ms. Davis said. “I know it sounds crazy but no other way to put it. In about 20 minutes I heard lots of neighborhood dogs in direction he was walking start barking. Anyone else seen something like this?”
Late the following Sunday afternoon on Chapman Mountain in northeast Huntsville, local realtor Sabrina Presto said on Facebook that she “saw (for the second time) what appeared to be a good-sized black panther.
“I know, I know,” Presto wrote, “but I’m telling you …. I’ve seen it twice. This evening it walked behind our waterfall as we were sitting on the patio.” It was still daylight, Presto said on Facebook, and she identified the animal as big, black and having a long tail.
Presto and her husband have a back yard that backs up to a nature preserve. They have installed a waterfall and have watched coyotes, bobcats, deer and other animals stop for a drink.
The two sighting reports are miles apart but both in the mountains east and southeast of downtown Huntsville. A lot of that land belongs to Monte Sano State Park and the Land Trust of North Alabama. The trust alone protects 9,000 acres of wood, streams and trails.
“I have not heard anything,” Land Trust executive director Marie Bostick said Monday about a panther sighting. “There have been no reports by staff.” Bostick did not discount the possibility of a panther, however, but “not black.”
John Hornsey, maintenance supervisor for Monte Sano State Park in Huntsville, said he has not seen a panther but his wife once saw a mountain lion crossing a park road. Mountain lion screams were also heard about a decade ago but not recently, he said. But a 2014 article by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources agreed with Bostick saying reports of large black cats are made “year after year” but none has been caught.
Alabama has two native cats – the mountain lion and the bobcat – and neither is black. In the eastern hemisphere – Asia and Africa – the leopard is the only wild cat with a “black or melanistic phase,” wrote retired wildlife biologist Mitchell Marks. That cat is often called a “black panther.”
In the western hemisphere, the jaguar is the largest and best known of the black cats. “Its current range is mostly restricted to Central and South America,” Marks wrote. The other black cat, the jaguarundi, is much closer in size to a house cat than a jaguar.
“It is suspected that some large cats may have been released from captivity, which could account for some sightings,” Marks wrote. “Most people aren’t prepared to take care of a cat that weighs over 100 pounds.”
How many of those cats are released or escape “we may never know,” Marks wrote, but it is a potential explanation for the big black cat reports in Alabama. If you see one, Marks said, try to preserve its tracks. Take photographs and place a bucket over the tracks. Then contact the Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries for further investigation.