Cougar or Big Domestic Cat Sighting Reported Near Dexter

“Cougar sighting! Between Huron River and Chamberlin heading towards Chamberlin. Please watch your animals when they are outside!”

That’s how the post on Nextdoor began.

Nextdoor is a location-based social networking app for neighborhoods that connects residents with each other.

The message was posted on April 18, by Kaitlin Gotcher of Walsh Road, after she and her grandparents observed a big cat in the backyard.

Gotcher’s post noted that cougars are endangered and protected under state law, so please take care, and she said she reported the sighting to the DNR (Michigan Department of Natural Resources) website and left a phone message with the agency.

With the post came a couple of photos. Not the best, as Gotcher says, but as she also says, the tail is significant. Meaning it looks like a cougars distinct tail.

The Sun Times News (STN) followed up with Gotcher through Nextdoor to ask about the sighting and why she posted it on social media.

Gotcher said the photos were taken by her grandfather, Gerald Cushnyr, who had first seen the cougar.

“We saw it from the windows looking out to our backyard, which also looks into the neighbor’s yard behind us, which is where we spotted the cougar,” Gotcher told STN.

She it was in the evening, around 7:20-7:30 p.m., and as Gotcher said, “The cougar was just casually strolling along the back fence of our neighbor’s property.”

She said her grandmother believed it was a young one, maybe one or two years old.

“This was the first time I had seen a big cat in the area personally, but I have seen and heard them before when I lived in Washington state,” Gotcher told STN.

Because she knew cougars were originally native to the area and she had heard they were spotted in the middle of Michigan, she said she wasn’t extremely shocked as the knowledge that a cougar came all the way down to southeast Michigan, “but there was still some of that initial surprise to have seen a predator of that size in the Dexter bubble.”

“I think, because I was safe in my parents’ home and at least a couple of hundred feet from it, and because it wasn’t behaving in a threatening way, I wasn’t scared, and was more interested in identifying the wildlife than anything else,” Gotcher told STN. “It wasn’t until the initial excitement ended that I realized this is probably something that should be reported, as cougars are not a widely known danger in the area.”

So she reported it to the DNR and posted on social media on platforms she believed would reach the most people in the area: Nextdoor and Facebook.

Looking back on the experience, Gotcher said, “it was a fortunate chance that I got to see a big cat literally in my backyard, and it’s beautiful that even with everything going on in the world, wildlife have been returning to their native habitats. Many communities coexist perfectly well with this sort of wildlife, and attacks are rare. As long as we are aware and respect wildlife around us, coexisting should be no issue. We have done it before, we can do it again.”

So that was a goal of her post, helping to bring some awareness to the community.

To learn more, STN was also able to connect with Brian Roell, a DNR Wildlife Biologist-Large Carnivore Specialist.

STN asked could this sighting be credible.

Roell said, “No, we have reviewed the photographs, and the pictures are a domestic cat.”

Roell said they do not have any evidence of cougars living in the Lower Peninsula, and currently, the only confirmed cougar evidence is found in the Upper Peninsula.

STN asked him if there was anything in particular he would like to say about this sighting.  

“We encourage folks to report their sightings to our ‘Eyes in the Field’ web-based reporting system,” Roell said. “We (cougar team) do review these reports monthly and if evidence is submitted with their report, they will receive a response from me.”

With the DNR saying it’s a domestic cat, Gotcher responds with that’s a big 60 pound domestic cat.

Photos by Gerald Cushnyr