Catalina Island is home to a wide variety of animal life ranging from our iconic buffalo (OK, bison) and white-tailed deer, to our darling little foxes and untamed shrews.
As we all know, many of these animals are not native to the Island and found themselves here only by means of introduction via the Island’s only bipedal mammal, homo sapiens.
Catalina Island is home to a wide variety of animal life ranging from our iconic buffalo (OK, bison) and white-tailed deer, to our darling little foxes and untamed shrews.
As we all know, many of these animals are not native to the Island and found themselves here only by means of introduction via the Island’s only bipedal mammal, homo sapiens.
There are many mysteries surrounding these introduced animals (particularly humans). But this week and next I will deal with an exotic beast that many claim to have witnessed wandering the hills of the Interior over the years: a genuine “black panther.”
To begin with, let’s get one thing straight: there is no such thing as a “black panther” per se. “Black panthers” are really nothing more than otherwise normal members of the large cat family that have a case of what’s known as melanism, or a genetic darkening of the fur and skin.
Even the term “panther” is something of a misnomer, since it is derived from the Latin classification “panthera” and applies equally to lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars.
While black South American jaguars get the lion’s share of publicity in the “black panther” department, African leopards and North American cougars (a.k.a. mountain lions) have also been known to exhibit this anomaly. Though rare, sightings of “black cougars” in Southern California are not unheard of.
But Catalina Island has never been known to harbor any members of the large cat family, much less melanistic ones.
There’s actually a scientific name for such out-of-place items. The official term, believe it or not, is “Out-of-Place Artifacts,” or “OOPArt.” The term was originally coined by a naturalist and cryptozoologist by the name of Ivan T. Sanderson.
The term “artifact” can loosely be defined here to include not only archaeological artifacts, but living critters who are found places where they ain’t supposed to be. As examples, our planet’s two most celebrated OOPArt cryptids are, of course, the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.
Other fascinating examples of non-living types of OOPArts are such things as the Dorchester Pot, a metal pot claimed to have been blasted out of solid stone in a quarry in 1852; ancient graffiti written in the long-extinct Phoenician language scribed on cave walls in Brazil; traces of nicotine and cocaine (endemic to the New World) found in the tissues of ancient Egyptian mummies; and 5,000-year-old peanuts—also a New World product—found in caves in China long before there was any contact between the two continents, supposedly.
But back to our friendly neighborhood Black Panther: Long-time Avalon resident and professor extraordinaire Dr. Bill Bushing recalls an incident from the 1970s when he lived and worked at Toyon Bay northwest of Avalon. A visiting biologist from Massachusetts’ prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution came running up to his unit one day and asked if there were any “large black cats” on the Island.
Bushing, who himself holds a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, said the man had been walking by the old tennis courts at Toyon when he saw such a cat standing up at a nearby drinking fountain lapping up water from the fountain’s basin.
“I told him what I knew about the black panther,” said Bushing, adding that he personally had never sighted such a beast on the Island.
The biologist then led Bushing to the drinking fountain. “There in the mud,” said Bushing, “were two large, fresh paw prints.” The “cougar-sized” prints,” he said, “were much bigger than a feral cat.”
Over the years, Bushing said numerous others had claimed similar observations, including a group of biologists from USC and even an L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy.
But sightings are not confined to long-passed decades and sightings have been reported in recent years and even months.
Something to think about the next time you’re sleeping under the stars at Ben Weston …
NEXT WEEK: CATALINA’S “BLACK PANTHER”: Part 2