This photo of a mountain lion, found at a hunters’ discussion site, purports to have been taken in June of this year in Hillsdale; however, its authenticity can’t be verified. UPDATE: Thanks to web research by Alan Coon, it now appears that as suspected, the photo above is from another area—Michigan.
Several years ago, another photo said to be of a mountain lion dragging a deer past a local video camera circulated on Facebook, but that appears to have been a hoax using footage from a a faraway game preserve.
Anecdotally, this site has heard many accounts from residents of seeing both mountain lions and bobcats in the area—and I’ve seen what looked like one of the latter bound across 9G in Livingston earlier this year.
An acquaintance has also claimed to have seen a very large-tusked wild boar on her property in Hillsdale. About a decade ago, newspapers were awash with humorous stories about a Vietnamese pig that was running wild around Tivoli for much of one summer.
Certainly, there are black bear all over the County. And I’ve seen them twice in a dozen years right in downtown Hudson: once in the churchyard of the First Presbyterian Church sometime around 2004, and once in a neighbor’s garden in the 100 block of Warren Street in 1998. (In the latter case, law enforcement officers were actually seen tossing donuts over the fence to the bear until the game warden could show up with a tranquilizer.)
A 2008 About Town article by Arlene Wege discusses the range of possible or mythical sitings of various large beasts in the region. As she notes, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation does not acknowledge mountain lions’ presence here, but some hunters at the site above note that DEC is often slow to make major changes in their inventories.
