Seattle cougar sighting in 1981 was no tall tale

The calls started burning up the phones lines to the Seattle office of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in 1981.

A cougar was spotted in Discovery Park in Magnolia.

Really?

There were doubts, but it was Mike Krenz's job to find out.

Krenz, who still works with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, was one of two enforcement officers assigned to scour the park for the cat that might have been nothing more than an illusion.

Armed with two cougar-hunting hound dogs, he and partner, Robert Overly, headed into the woods that late August.

Did they find a cougar?

"We were unable to confirm it," Krenz, 57, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon, as he contemplated the reported sightings this week and last of a cougar roaming Magnolia and near Woodland Park Zoo.

Krenz isn't convinced these newest reports are the real thing.

But he was equally suspicious in 1981.

"There were reports of dogs who were cougars; another one turned out to be a house cat."

Back then, some firemen who had gone to the park snapped a picture of what they believed to be the Discovery Park cougar, but when the film was developed, it turned out to be a house cat.

Nevertheless, the story of a cougar lurking about grew.

The media dubbed the elusive cat D.B. Cougar because the critter seemed to have simply dropped into the park, much like the real D.B. Cooper dropped from the sky and disappeared into the wilderness near the Oregon border.

All the early reports seemed to be false, said Krenz, "but they kept coming in and having a cougar in Seattle got everyone a bit excited."

So once again with dogs in tow, the wildlife officers returned to the park and found a sign: a pile of raccoon heads, four of them. The leftovers of cougar food.

"Uh, oh, now we have some legitimate sign," Krenz says he remembers uttering at the time.

The wildlife officers stepped up their efforts.

A Seattle Parks Department employee had an idea. He raked smooth a sand dune along the park's bluff, thinking that if there was a cougar out there, he might walk across the sand and leave a footprint or two.

It wasn't long before some big critter left a print in the sand.

Officials made a plaster cast of that print and took it to the Burke Museum, where it was identified as that of a male cougar weighing in the 115-pound range.

So, now convinced there was a cougar out there, Krenz and Overly went back to the park and turned the dogs loose. It was midnight.

Krenz was up on the bluff when he heard a noise that sounded like twigs breaking, an animal moving through the trees.

Krenz shined his lights on a tree that extended over the bluff and spotted the cougar, where the cat had sought refuge from the dogs that were following its scent. Krenz could hear the sounds of the dogs circling in on their prey.

"Cougars are quite afraid of dogs and the cougar knew the dogs were onto him," he said.

Krenz summoned the other searchers and they tranquilized the animal with a dart gun. The cat fell over the cliff, but officials retrieved it, kept it for a week and released it near Enumclaw.

Susan Gilmore: 206-464-2054 or sgilmore@seattletimes.com