Prowling big cat? Looks like a house cat, wildlife biologist says

House cat or something bigger?

Video captured by a Lady’s Island resident of what appeared to be a large feline slinking in the dark on Lady’s Island stirred excitement online Thursday. But in all likelihood, the animal wasn’t the fierce predator some seemed to see, a S.C. Department of Natural Resources biologist said Friday.

“As soon as I saw it, I said it looks like a house cat,” DNR’s Jay Butfiloski, a biologist who specializes in fur-bearing animals and who watched the video Friday, said.

Lady’s Island neighbors Ben Tanner and Chuck Riley were looking for coyotes.

They regularly heard what they thought were the animal’s calls. There had been reported sightings, paw prints, and ducks and chickens with their throats torn out.

They deployed Riley’s game camera on their properties, which total about a dozen acres off Springfield Road. Deer are the most common subject, and one was in the shot from early Thursday morning when something slipped by in the back of the frame.

“Big cat of some sort at the house!!” Tanner posted with the video on Facebook on Thursday night. “Panther/cougar? Watch it slip across behind the deer’s butt.”

What appears to be a large cat eases by in the background, with a long tail and eyes aglow.

Tanner and Riley had been hearing the strange noises for about a month and assumed it was coyotes. But this is what emerged, caught on camera about 2:30 a.m. Thursday.

The video garnered about 10,000 views on Tanner’s page. He is convinced this was more than a friendly furball.

“I have hunted all my life and pretty sure that’s no house cat like some have said,” Tanner said.

But eastern cougars were declared extinct by federal wildlife officials in 2011, after years of review, Butfiloski noted. Western cougars are trending east, but it could be decades before one is spotted here, he said.

A big cat like a cougar would leave evidence — tracks, discarded carcasses of consumed white-tailed deer — or the cats would be found hit by cars from time to time. That hasn’t happened here.

A wild cougar hasn’t been verified in the state in almost 100 years, Butfiloski said, adding that someone would have noticed if they were around.

Even tiny dogs have been known to tree cougars in West. Those cases haven’t been reported on the East Coast.

And a panther making its way up from Florida would have had a tricky route to Lady’s Island, Butfiloski said.

But he understands the aura of the big cats. DNR gets calls all the time from throughout the state about similar sightings.

Many people believe cougars are all over the state and that state wildlife officials are part of a cover-up. Butfiloski said that isn’t true.

“We don’t have any real evidence to back up anything,” he said. “The places they occur, they leave signs.”

He did note there are some people who keep the large felines as pets that sometimes escape.

But this video doesn’t seem to project that type of animal, Butfiloski said. The cat is low to the ground and doesn’t seem to phase the deer as it passes.

It impossible to know for sure the size of the animal based on the video, he added, saying the perspective is made worse by the circulated video being one Tanner seemed to have recorded on his phone of another screen.

Tanner admitted the cat’s large appearance could be some visual trick of scale. He walked out to the spot the cat walked past to try and find a bush or other marker to provide perspective.

But there was nothing.

Now several cameras have gone out in an effort to capture the animal on screen again, Tanner said. Slabs of meat might be used to sweeten the scene.

Tanner, though an avid hunter, confessed to some uneasiness as he walked in the dark to return the camera Thursday night. Big cats can pounce from trees, he noted, and he is accustomed to game on the ground.

“You never know what you’re going to get on camera,” he said. “But the chances of catching that thing again.”

This story was originally published September 9, 2016 at 5:42 AM with the headline "Prowling big cat? Looks like a house cat, wildlife biologist says."