Mountain lions in New Jersey? Not as crazy as it might sound.

Have big cats returned to Springsteenstan after a 150-year absence? The NYC website The Awl notes this report of multiple cougar sightings in the piney hills of New Jersey. The Asbury Park Press (where I once applied for a job and thank god that didn’t work out) reports  several big cat encounters and then shoots them down – the encounters, not the cats – with this perfectly reasonable explanation:

Police also talked to some Marlboro residents who live near Routes 9 and 520 and who said they lost a Savannah cat about four or five years ago. They speculated that the lean animal, which weighs about 20 pounds and has a long tail, could still be in the area and mistaken for a mountain lion.

But and still.

A couple years ago I wrote a story for National Geographic about a cougar shot down by police in Chicago. The big question at the time was whether the cougar was a pet who jumped the fence or a bona fide wild cat from the Black Hills of South Dakota. Most of the experts I spoke with a) doubted the cat could have ranged 1,000 miles from home and b) said there was no way a truly wild cat, unfamiliar with humans and their ways,  would have set foot near a major urban area.

But there were others — some scientists, yes, but also advocates — who said the cat would likely turn out to be wild. “I believe there are cougars in every state except Hawaii,” one advocate told me. And indeed, there seems to be a steady stream of cougar sightings across the United States, including in upstate New York.

Enter the animal pathologists. If the dead cougar was  a pet, an autopsy would likely show it to be a South American cougar. (Apparently, most pet cougars are smuggled from south of the border.) If, however, the pathology report described a North American cat, the victim was likely a wild vagabond.

Many months later, I made a series of phone calls to Chicago and learned the dead cat was in fact from North Dakota. Adolescent mountain lion males have a ranging instinct that kicks in just before puberty. It compels them to leave their home range before the older and stronger cats come to see them as competition – and the walkabout doesn’t stop until the man-child finds a mate.

For most male cougars – their habitat limited to the Black Hills, parts of the Rockies and perhaps parts of New Hampshire – the search never ends.