Local musician Butch Azevedo recalls a memorable day only a few years ago when he was out in the Interior doing some oak sapling monitoring near the Laura Stein Volunteer Camp.
While taking a lunch break, he said he and the other members of his group spotted a large black cat pacing around at a distance of about 200 yards.
“It was not a deer, it was not a buffalo, it was not a regular cat. This thing was huge, probably 200-plus pounds,” he said, swaying his shoulders back and forth in panther-like fashion.
Local musician Butch Azevedo recalls a memorable day only a few years ago when he was out in the Interior doing some oak sapling monitoring near the Laura Stein Volunteer Camp.
While taking a lunch break, he said he and the other members of his group spotted a large black cat pacing around at a distance of about 200 yards.
“It was not a deer, it was not a buffalo, it was not a regular cat. This thing was huge, probably 200-plus pounds,” he said, swaying his shoulders back and forth in panther-like fashion.
In the summer of 2008, J. Gilligan was at Little Harbor Campground searching the beach area for the wayward children of some fellow campers when he came face to face with a large black cat in the dark of night.
While walking along the Whale’s Tale, the rocky prominence that juts out into the middle of the harbor, he pointed his flashlight to his left and spotted the critter only a few feet away from him. “The light was on the cat and the cat was looking at me,” he said.
While he has ruled out that the cat was a mountain lion, it was nevertheless one special cat indeed, he said. “It was not a panther,” he said. “I’d call it a genetic freak of nature,” saying it was probably in the 20-pound range and came up about knee high.
During that same summer, he encountered several hunters from Arkansas staying at the same campground who reported a similar experience and asked Gilligan if there were any “black panthers” on the Island. Gilligan told them his tale. About three summers ago, Colleen Hernandez was working at the front desk of the Glenmore Plaza Hotel when she was approached by two couples who were staying at the hotel with a tail tale of their own.
“When they came back from their stroll,” said Hernandez, “one of the gentlemen asked if we had panthers or mountain lions on the Island.”
Growing up on Catalina, Hernandez had heard occasional rumors of sightings of black panthers on the Island, but never with any specifics. She related this to the guests.
The four then told her they had seen what they believed to be a “black mountain lion” pacing along the hill near the Casino.
When it was pointed out to the guests that the area is a gathering place for feral cats and that what they saw may have been a rather large specimen of same, one of the men responded with a decisive “no,” adding that they all lived in mountain lion country and knew well the difference.
“He was positive it was not a regular cat,” said Hernandez. “He said the way it moved and the size of it, that’s how they were convinced.”
In the words of Thomas Magnum, I know what you’re thinking. How could such a critter possibly exist on Catalina? In the 30 million years or so since Catalina first hung out its shingle, the Island has never been connected to the mainland, not even for a few minutes.
Furthermore, the span of the San Pedro Channel has always been considered an impassable barrier to the dispersion of large land mammals.
For the record, the Catalina Island Conservancy, which administers the Island’s wildlands, has no record of any reports nor evidence of large members of the cat family on the Island. In an interview two years ago, former chief of Conservation & Education for the Conservancy Carlos de la Rosa said he thinks it is “highly unlikely” such a beast could roam the hills of Catalina.
“Any of the biologists who have been here for a long time don’t put much credibility in this story,” he said, adding that people who have reported sightings were probably seeing something much tamer, such as a large feral cat or perhaps a pet dog.
“There are a number of black feral cats up to 15 to 20 pounds in the Interior,” he said. “Possibly they saw one from a distance.”
Our porcine friends may be another explanation, according to de la Rosa:
“Five or six years ago they might have seen pigs,” he said, “because some of the pigs were actually black,” he said.
If, however, for the sake of argument, we say that at least some of the sightings of a black mountain lion are indeed accurate, the most plausible explanation would be that somewhere along the line an exotic pet owner on the mainland grew tired of having his slippers, newspapers and Plymouths chewed up and decided to rid himself of “Whiskers” or “Eldridge” or whatever he called his pet black panther.
A person owning such an animal would presumably be of some financial means and might have access to a vessel large enough to transport the animal to Catalina; a thoughtless act that would obviously put many people in danger.
Problem is, given that the average life expectancy of a cougar in the wild is only about 8 to 12 years, this wouldn’t explain the span of decades of reports, unless of course (Heaven forbid) there’s a whole pride of them out there breeding…
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series on reported sightings of a black panther on Catalina Island. Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores in Avalon.