[Slickcraft]

Article below in today's LDS.

While I don't dispute the sighting, a very large bob cat was live trapped last winter near the Gilford transfer station.

Delivery man says he spotted cougar near Lily Pond early Tuesday morning
By Michael Kitch
Jul 28, 2011 12:00 am

GILFORD — A month after a cougar that was founded to have wandered all the way from its South Dakota birthplace was killed on a Connecticut highway, a Manchester man reported spotting a live one crossing Route 11 and plunging into the woods by Lily Pond early yesterday morning.

Jeff Cuddy delivers snack foods to retail outlets across the state for a distributorship, setting out before dawn and aiming to make his first stop by 5 a.m. On Wednesday he drove north on I-93 to Exit 20 then through Tilton and Belmont on Route 3 before turning east toward Gilford on the bypass. He said that he reached the end of the bypass and the traffic light at Route 11 around 4:10 a.m. and there he saw the mountain lion.

"It was 20 or 30 feet in front of me," Cuddy recalled. "It jumped a fence and went into the woods by the pond. It was pretty much a flash. Maybe three seconds."

"I drive a lot in the early morning and see a lot of creatures. I've hit moose and hit a deer and seen foxes, racoons and all sorts of creatures. I thought it's got to be deer because of the color," he continued. "Or maybe a coyote. But, it didn't have a deer face and it was bigger than a coyote. When I saw the tail it turned my mind to thinking it was a cat."

"I've seen bobcats before," Cuddy said, "but unless this one's been hanging around a nuclear power station, it was no bobcat." He said the animal was bigger than his 85-pound golden retriever and "weighed more than 100 pounds, definitely."

Cuddy said that after the sighting he called his wife, who told him about the cougar in Connecticut. She reported the sighting to the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department.

For years the department has received frequent reports of sightings of cougars, including one by an employee of the agency who claimed to have seen a lion on the lawn of her home in Barnstead in September 2009. However, officials have yet to collect any physical or photographic evidence to confirm the presence of cougars in New Hampshire.

The 140-pound male cougar killed by a sport utility vehicle after dark near New Haven, Connecticut last month was traced to the Black Hills of South Dakota through its DNA.

"It's a mystery," Cuddy remarked, "but I know what I saw."