(HOST) Recently, commentator Ted Levin got new license plates. And he noticed something different about them – something he doesn’t quite approve of.
(LEVIN) Before I came to Vermont, I had an assortment of jobs. I’ve worked as a national park service naturalist, a field biologist, a sanctuary manager, a busboy in Yosemite, and a lifeguard on the Atlantic, where I studied the sky and the gray chop, noting birds as well as bobbing heads. I’ve taught, tutored, dug fence holes, stained houses, caddied, and been a night watchman.
My favorite job was as an educator at the Bronx Zoo. The menagerie was my teaching tool, and the best part was I had access to baby zoo animals. My favorite was an Idaho cougar kitten named Carlos that had been confiscated by federal agents at the Port of New York.
When Carlos joined the zoo he was seven weeks old, soft and spotted, no bigger than a corgi, and extremely playful. As he grew his spots disappeared; he became tawny, like a summer deer. Together, we invented a game that we played on my lunch hour in the auditorium. I unleashed Carlos and he’d disappear into the maze of bolted-down chairs. Then, I would jog up and down the aisles until, unseen and silent, Carlos sprang like a phantom from behind a row, and grabbed my legs in a tackle. We played till I
hurt.
Carlos was aware of everything: ducks flying high overhead, elk grazing in the distance, an arrant rat, bison along the banks of the Bronx River. And everything held his interest. He was, after all, a cat. A very big cat. Curious. Tough as steel. And independent, which was why the zoo limited his contact with humans after eight months. But for the remainder of his short life – he died of pneumonia in his third year – Carlos remembered me. Whenever I stopped by the old Lion House, Carlos would lie at the edge of the cage closest to me and purr. It didn’t matter how many other people were there – Carlos always came to me.
So you might think I’d be delighted that the catamount has recently replaced the peregrine falcon on Vermont’s conservation license plates. But you’d be wrong. Whether you call them cougars, pumas, panthers, painters, catamounts or mountain lions – they’re all synonyms for the big tawny cat of the Americas, Puma concolor – they haven’t been reliably sighted in Vermont for more than a century. The last one was shot on Thanksgiving morning 1881 in Barnard. And it bothers me that the state has selected a vanished mammal for our conservation plate when there are plenty of endangered species that might still benefit from our conservation efforts. There’s the pine marten for example. And the lake sturgeon. My personal preference would be the timber rattlesnake. But if we really want to grace our conservation plates with an animal we can no longer conserve, I’d have to nominate the wooly mammoth.
Ted Levin is a nature writer and photographer.