A Conversation With the Smokies’ Mountain Lion Expert

Don Linzey—a wildlife biologist and professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation—has been studying mammals in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for 54 years. For much of that time, he’s cultivated a special interest in an animal that’s achieved almost mythic status in the minds of many mountain residents—the mountain lion. 

In 2018, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the eastern cougar subspecies from the endangered species list in order to “correct a lingering anomaly” that listed the species despite its having disappeared forever at least 70 years go. But the government’s assertion that mountain lions are long gone from the mountains hasn’t stopped countless reports of mountain lion sightings, or discouraged Linzey’s ongoing search for evidence of the giant cat’s presence. 

What initially drew you to focus your research on the Smokies? 

I worked as a park ranger naturalist for the Smokies for several summers while I was doing my Ph.D. grad student work at Cornell University. I did my Ph.D. thesis on the golden mouse in the park and for a while I was considered the expert in the whole country on that little mouse. Arthur Stupka was the very first park biologist, and he was near retirement age and in fact he actually had retired, but he kept a journal for 28 years and he stayed on to write up the notes from that journal. He wrote a book on the birds of the Smokies, the trees and woody shrubs of the Smokies. He coauthored a book on the reptiles and amphibians of the Smokies. And when he met my wife and I he said that he just didn’t have time to pull together all the mammal data and asked if we were interested in doing that. So we said yes. 

The eastern cougar was officially declared extinct in 2018. Yet, ask around and it’s not hard to find somebody with a mountain lion story. What do you think about the possibility of a viable population of mountain lions persisting in the Great Smoky Mountains region? 

That we don’t know. Some people say these are animals that people have released in the park. When you keep having these reports—and we get eight or ten reports a year from the Smokies—you’re not having eight or ten people releasing cougars in the park every year. Some people say, well the animals that are seen have made their way up from the Everglades. That’s conceivable, but it would be awfully, awfully rare for something like that to happen. Now we’ve got some evidence in Tennessee there’s one, possibly two animals there from South Dakota, so there may be some animals moving into the park. But the U.S government, the Department of Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service, they said years ago that the evidence they need is evidence of an animal actually breeding in the park to establish the fact that there is a breeding population. So they need some young animals, and the only evidence of this was back in 1976. 

When you think back on the sightings you’ve handled over the years, do any especially compelling reports come to mind? 

In June of 2002, there was a man and his wife driving back from Cherokee to Sugarlands It was at night and they were about half a mile from Sugarlands and they saw a cougar walk across the road in front of their car. Now this man was a veterinarian and he treats cougars in his practice in Knoxville. So do I tell someone like that, ‘Oh, you probably didn’t know what you were seeing?’ He’s familiar with these animals, and he and his wife tell me that they watched it walk across the road in front of their car. We’ve got a wildlife photographer who was coming from Cades Cove towards Sugarlands on Little River Road. When you get to within probably a mile and a half of Sugarlands, there’s a couple sharp curves in the road, and she saw a cougar come from the right side of the road to the left side of the road, but her camera was in the back seat so she couldn’t get a picture. About two weeks later I got another report from another visitor that they saw an animal at the same place. 

The Smokies do have one other native cat, the bobcat. What’s the status of the park’s bobcat population? 

It’s relatively abundant, but it’s very secretive and most people never see a bobcat. In fact, I saw the first one that I had ever seen in the park about a year ago. We have a home that’s bordered on two sides by the park, and I saw him up there and watched him for a couple minutes. Raccoons come into campgrounds, skunks come into campgrounds, bears come into campgrounds looking for garbage. Well, bobcats don’t do that. That’s why even though the bobcat is an inhabitant of the park, it’s rarely seen. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.