Are There Any Real Nittany Lions Remaining?

JeMarc Boliver is a family man who lives in Philipsburg, and he’s a full-time Penn State employee in Tech Services. During home football games, he works to help keep Beaver Stadium presentable.

Upon conclusion of last November’s Michigan game — a 28-16 defeat for Penn State — JeMarc immediately headed north. But before going home, he drove toward property owned by his sister and her husband. They had arranged for firewood to be dropped off at their campsite, and they wanted JeMarc to cover it with a tarp before rain arrived.

The property is remote — in the woodlands between Philipsburg and Clearfield, a half-mile from the nearest road. JeMarc arrived a bit before dusk in the late afternoon, and he could see everything except subtle shades of color. He saw one thing he will never forget.

“I’m going up the trail,” he says, “and I come across the area where the power lines cut through the property.  At the very base of the power line, I could see this massive cat. The tail was as long as the body. I couldn’t tell if it was gray or brown in the light, but I could tell it was a solid color, a light color.  The feet were enormous, and you could see the strong neck. I just kind of froze in my tracks and thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing this.’ “   

JeMarc was startled, but the cat took everything in stride. “It had its back to me; it was looking over the hills. It was aware that I was coming. It just kind of slowly turned its head and looked at me and then meandered down over the embankment.”   

WITHIN 10 YARDS

Boliver had unwittingly come within perhaps 10 yards of a huge cat. Raised in Farrell, Pa., he answers to the term “city boy,” though he did a little hunting as a teenager. As soon as he got home, he went on the Internet to determine the identity of the beast.

He already knew it wasn’t a bobcat — that was obvious from the cat’s long tail. But then he saw other indicators: its size, its large paws, its solid coat, its musculature. He concluded that he had seen a cougar, a puma, a panther, a mountain lion — all names for the same animal. Or, if you’re a Penn State fan, a “Nittany Lion.”

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Yes, the Nittany Lion. To those who grew up in Happy Valley or have become immersed in its culture, the Lion is a big deal. Not as a living creature, of course. Rather, the Nittany Lion continually morphs from one mythical image to another — a modernistic logo to an iconic statue to a mischievous mascot.  

All of us have heard repeatedly that the real lions of our region are long gone. Although there is an actual mountain lion on display in the Penn State All-Sports Museum (located in a corner of Beaver Stadium), that critter has been dead for 160 years. Known as the “Brush Lion,” it was shot in 1856 by Samuel Brush on his farm in Susquehanna County. The adjoining plaque says, “This animal, who killed only for food and avoided man as much as man allowed him to, was last seen in Central Pennsylvania in the early 1890s.”

I had no reason to doubt that statement until I was at a men’s meeting in my church, and I heard JeMarc’s father, John, say something about a mountain lion that his son had spotted. John never called it a “Nittany Lion” and neither did his son. When I sat down with him to hear about the big cat, JeMarc simply called it a mountain lion. It was left to me to make the symbolic linkage to the “Nittany Lion” — and I had little choice when I listened to his description.  

“The power, the poise…” said JeMarc. “It was graceful, elegant, an amazing creature.”  Hearing “graceful” and “elegant,” I immediately supplied a third word —“stately”— and then a certain song came to my mind.  “…But of all the honored idols, There’s but one that stands the test, It’s the stately Nittany Lion, The symbol of our best.”

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So what did JeMarc do when he went to work on the Monday after last year’s Michigan game?  Of course, he told his friends about the amazing animal he saw in Clearfield County. But he wasn’t prepared for the responses he got.

“It was very polarizing,” he notes. “Several people said, ‘We don’t have ‘em in Pennsylvania. The Game Commission says we don’t have ‘em.’  Other people were saying, ‘Can you describe this cat to me?’ And this one guy from the Lewistown area pulled me aside and told me he had seen a creature like that a number of years before. “

A Smithsonian Institute conservator makes repairs to the ‘Brush Lion’ that now resides in the Penn State All-Sports Museum.
Photo: Penn State Libraries University Archives 

‘WE’RE NOT LYIN’…WE’VE SEEN LIONS!’

John Sholly is the resident of Mifflin County who works with JeMarc and who claims to have seen a mountain lion 12 or 13 years ago.  He is typical of the small but determined number of such witnesses.  

“I was returning home from a job in Galeton,” says Sholly. “I was driving down Route 144, and it’s very mountainous down through there. I had just crested the top of a hill, and I caught a glimpse of something crossing from my left to my right. I thought, ‘Was that a mountain lion or a bobcat?’ Because it wasn’t a deer and it wasn’t a bear.

“I pulled over and I got out of the truck and stood there, just trying to listen. As soon as I got out of the truck, I realized there was water running down there. I thought, ‘Whatever that was, it could be going down there to get a drink and it’s going to come back up.’  And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be standing here if it uses the same path.’  So I turned my truck around and went back up to the crest of the hill, maybe 60 yards away.

“And all of a sudden there comes this thing back across the road… And I just kind of peeked my head across and I got a good look at this thing running. It was definitely a mountain lion, there’s no way it was a bobcat. It was too big and it had a big, long tail. I got to see it for 6 or 8 seconds.”

Sholly, 46, is a lifetime hunter. His cat sighting took place many years ago and from a moderate distance.  Boliver, meanwhile, is 36 years old, and he has only a little experience as a hunter. He observed his cat just 10 months ago from an extremely close vantage point. The only things these men have in common are that they work together at Penn State, and they report that they’ve seen mountain lions.

Indeed, many individuals in Pennsylvania and neighboring states are making such claims. According to John Lutz, director of the Eastern Puma Research Network, “We’ve had reports of sightings in 31 cases across (Pennsylvania) over the last 12 months. Sightings have been reported in Adams, Fulton, Potter and Monroe counties; also up in the Poconos.”

You might think Lutz would welcome every report of a mountain lion to support his belief that the species is still found — in small numbers —throughout the eastern states.  (He welcomes phone calls from cat spotters on this number: 304-749-7778.) But no, he’s keenly aware of how hoaxes can produce skepticism toward legitimate sightings.   

“I’m leery of pictures that people send me,” says the 75-year-old resident of Baltimore who has studied mountain lion sightings since 1965. “There’s been a set of pictures that… came out on the Internet in 2010. They were supposed to be a mother cougar and two cubs walking in a snowbank. The same picture has been sent to me by at least a dozen people, and each one (said) ‘It happened in my area.’  From Pennsylvania, from Maine, from New Hampshire, from South Carolina in the mountains, and also one from Illinois, one from Indiana, and a couple from western Kentucky. And when I answered back, I said, ‘Now come on, get real.’ ”

Nonetheless, Lutz asserts, “I am convinced there are resident mountain lions in the Poconos, along the Appalachians in Pennsylvania and in the northern mountains of Potter and Cameron Counties.”

The Eastern cougars that once roamed — some say still– the mountains of Central Pennsylvania have become Penn State’s enduring symbol of the Nittany Lion. Photo: Morton Lin/Onward State

‘THE FACTS ROAR…THERE AIN’T NO MORE!’

If you check in with experts from academia or government, you’ll get a different perspective. It’s not that these folks are trying to be party poopers. They just think the facts rule out any resident mountain lions in Pennsylvania.

At the state level, Game Commission spokesman Travis Lau offers this comment: “I try to be careful when I talk about it being impossible that mountain lions are in Pennsylvania, because you can never say ‘never.’ But we’ve never documented or confirmed a single sighting of a mountain lion. We’ve never had a mountain lion struck by a vehicle and killed on the road, killed by a hunter, killed by a homeowner in self-defense, etc. We just don’t have any evidence that there are any here and living in the wild.”  

Even if a few lion sightings should be found credible, Lau offers two explanations. “In addition to the possibility that there are wild mountain lions moving through from some other place…there is always the possibility that a mountain lion sighted in the wild would be a captively-raised mountain lion.“  

As for the federal government, lion lovers will gain no hope from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. In a 2011 report, the USFWS performed its version of “out of the frying pan and into the fire” by changing the eastern cougar’s label from “endangered” to “extinct.”

SYMPATHETIC BUT SKEPTICAL

No observer is more torn by the “lion is” vs. “lion ain’t” debate than Jeff Mulhollem, editor of Pennsylvania Outdoor News and a public relations specialist for Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. “For years,” says Mulhollem, “I wanted to believe it because it’s kinda cool to have a top of the food chain predator that survives in the woods. And one of my best friends claims to have seen a mountain lion. He’s eminently credible.

“But in Pennsylvania,” he notes, “there’s literally an army of hunters, many who go far into the woods hunting deer. I’ve never heard of a cougar sighting that could be confirmed. No one ever got a photo, no one ever shot one. And most impressively, there’s never been a wild cougar hit on a road in Pennsylvania. But in the state of Florida, there’s a wild reproducing population — they call it the Florida Panther, a sub-species of the eastern cougar. There are less than 200 individuals and every year there are maybe a dozen killed on highways.”

What to conclude? I don’t have the foggiest idea. All is know is that I’m eager for a look at either kind of Nittany Lion. The one that prowls around the mountains of Pennsylvania. Or the one that proudly stands atop the national football rankings. Both have seemingly been extinct for altogether too long.

There are some Lions in Central PA whose existence is beyond dispute. Photo: Patrick Mansell/Penn State