In 2004, it was donated to the State Museum of Pennsylvania, where it remains in storage.ĭespite her rough appearance, the Anson Panther is a valuable piece of Pennsylvania history, said Dr. Since then, the spring in Albany has been known as Panther Springs.Īnson has the distinction of being the last man to kill a panther in Pennsylvania.Īnson's panther was mounted, and then bounced around to a number of homes in southern Pennsylvania. A co-worker, Thomas Anson, retrieved a gun and tracked the animal to a nearby spring, where he put several bullets into the panther's body, according to Henry Shoemaker, who wrote the book "Extinct Pennsylvania Animals." Returning one night, a worker noticed he was being stalked by a large cat. Over several nights, the workers heard an animal prowling about their camp.
They've been gone since 1874.įrom time to time, however, outdoorsmen and motorists have sworn they've spotted a panther in the woods or near roads.īut the last wild panther known to have walked in the Pennsylvania woods did so here in Berks County.īack in 1874, several lumbermen were working in Albany Township near the famed rocky outcropping, the Pinnacle. Today, the mountain lions are but a memory in these parts. Still, the female panther, mounted on a slab of wood, represents a lost part of Pennsylvania's past.Īt one time, these majestic animals - known also as pumas, mountain lions and cougars - prowled the deep woods of the Keystone State. Q: Is it true that the last panther killed in Pennsylvania was shot in Berks County? You ask Youker is a weekly feature providing answers to quirky curiosities of the Berks County area. It might be years before any solid answers are provided which means the folklore and debates about mountain lion sightings in the Twin Tiers of New York and Pennsylvania will most certainly rage on.A mount of the Anson Panther, the last known mountain lion in Pennsylvania, is in storage at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg. Have mountain lions been migrating from the west to the east? Has the government been slowly and stealthy reintroducing the animal to the Northeast? Or, has the average bobcat just grown so large that people are confused about what they're seeing? The same study also took a look at which states would be most habitable for mountain lions and those states were New Hampshire, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania. It isn't completely out of the realm of possibility that a rogue mountain lion from the west coast could have found its way into the Twin Tiers and that is what residents of the Brackney, Pennsylvania area have seen.Ī 2016 study conducted by wildlife experts claimed that reintroducing mountain lions to the Northeast would reduce white-tailed deer density which in turn would reduce deer/vehicle collisions by 22 percent, preventing " 21,400 human injuries, 155 fatalities, and $2.13 billion in preventive costs within just 30 years of reintroduction.' A cougar of unknown origin was also killed in Kentucky in December 2014," according to the U.S. In 2011, a male mountain lion was found to have traveled nearly 2,000 miles from " South Dakota through Minnesota, Wisconsin and New York, and was killed on a Connecticut highway. What then are people actually seeing? Have bobcats grown in size and are they being confused for the massively large mountain lion? Or, have mountain lions from the west coast somehow managed to travel east into New York and Pennsylvania without detection? Even National Geographic refers to the Mountain Lion as the "Bigfoot of Big Cats" because it is so elusive and mystical, even. Fish and Wildlife Service claims that the version of the animal that was once located in the eastern part of the United States has actually been extinct for some 70 years. While there is no argument that cougars (also called mountain lions) as a whole are very much still alive, the U.S.
Then, in 2018, it officially declared that the eastern version of the animal was in fact extinct. Fish and Wildlife Service unofficially deemed the eastern cougar ( or mountain lion) extinct. Obviously, people have a lot of opinions on whether or not mountain lions have found their way back to the Twin Tiers. The post by Choconut Inn garnered over 100 comments which ranged from those who swear they've seen the big cat with their own eyes to those who say it's more likely that what people have seen are just big bobcats.
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