Mythical Big Black Cat

  MONTGOMERY-From the Mobile Wolf Woman, to Bigfoot, and the North Alabama “White Thang,” Alabama has many mythical creatures, lurking within local folklore. One such animal is the elusive Alabama black panther. Multiple large black cat sightings are reported every year with little to no credible evidence found. These sightings are often due to misidentification. There are few species of large cat that can have the appearance of being completely black, due to a production of excessive melanin, termed melanism. Such species of large cat are leopards and jaguars which reside in southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. Another species is the common house cat. House cats can be all types of color variants, including solid black.

With no native black cats in Alabama, wildlife professionals assist with some interesting animal identification inquires. Most sightings are brief, seen from a moving vehicle, allowing for one’s imagination to associate a misidentified animal with a folklore legend. Others tell of an animal that screams like a crazy woman, leaving only one explanation, it’s a black panther. Often blurry game camera photos turn out to have spatial and directional inaccuracies, leaving the only answer to be, a huge black cat. Most often those game camera images are of misidentified otters, foxes, bobcats, housecats, dogs, coyotes, or black bears. Tracks, scat, and injured livestock often lead back to dogs, coyotes, and even black bears.

While many other species account for these sightings, in Alabama we do have two native feline species often misidentified as black panthers, one being the bobcat the other is the mountain lion.
Bobcats are smaller, stocky cats with short tails with adults weighing 25 to 35lbs, and are brown and gray with variable spotted fur. Bobcats are often the culprits of blurry game cameras photos and misidentified tracks. The second species that historically occurred in Alabama is the mountain lion, also known as the cougar. Cougars are brown to gray in color, weighing 75 to 120 pounds, and can reach a length of about 6½ feet, nose to tail. This species was believed to be extirpated (no longer exists in an area) from Alabama in the mid-1800s. While there is no self-sustaining population found in Alabama, occasional sightings could occur from cougars passing thru looking for new territories, but none have been documented in quite some time. Cougars are often misunderstood and lend themselves to our local folklore stories.

After reviewing numerous game camera pictures, trapping records, car strikes, and hunting records for many years, no documented evidence of native black panthers, or large black cats in Alabama exist. However, if you think you’ve sighted the mythical big black cat, take a photo and save the track, you never know when you might be the first to turn fiction into fact.

Media Release/Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources