I have 26 acres in woods on a small river in north Alabama. We have seen mountain lions on my property. A lady up the hill has seen a bear on her property. We also have deer and wild hogs. You don’t go walking in the woods without a baseball bat or a gun going with you, especially about dusk . . . that is when the cats come out.
I am only 8 miles out from a town of 10,000 and the rural areas around me are somewhat thickly settled. But that small river is mostly bounded by hills and bluffs, making a wooded corridor along its path that provides good cover for larger animals.
I am outside almost everyday, in my fields and woods. I’ve been working with trees from my woods in my sawmill, so I go out daily.
I just ask for anyone in Alabama who has seen a cougar, please take a picture. I have game cameras throughout my woods, and I have lots of photos of deer, raccoons, possums, coyotes, foxes, armadillos, skunks, weasels and birds of all kinds, from buzzards to turkeys all they way down to hummingbirds, but no panthers. Nor have I seen any Alabama based game cameras showing them either.
I have similar very remote property in the Az. mountains here. Even though Cats normally control their own population through respecting each others territory, it doesn’t always work that way. Our local rancher had to give up on ranging stock on our mountain because there are just too many cats up there.
We had a sighting across the street from our farm in October and our game cam picked up this mountain lion a week later. We are located on Lookout Mountain in NW Georgia. I would post the picture here, but I don’t know how.