I had an unusual experience a couple of weeks ago. I was visiting a friend in Colorado doing a little hunting and just messing around.

At about noon one day my friend goes to investigate a call of a lion running down the street. We arrived in the area and were treated to the sight of a coal black, big mountain lion. We saw him for about 5 minutes as he left town in no great hurry.

I was just wondering if any of you have heard of black lions anywhere else?

YES!!!! my grandparents have a cabin down on a creek bottom and saw one slinking through their willows on the edge of their lawn...couldn't figure out why a mountain lion would be black!!! Very interesting indeed.

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God Bless and Shoot Straight

In central Illinois about 15 years ago my brother spotted one with a cub, I was flying and by the time I got the plane turned around they had reached some trees so I didn't see them but my brother swears they were cats with long tails, and he has the best eyesight of anyone I know.

OK OK, here is a true story to show what I mean.... I got a pretty nice reflecting telescope and the first time I was showing it to him I showed him the planet Saturn, so you can see the rings which look pretty cool. Anyway my brother looks through the telescope for a while, then later looks up at the stars and says "That telescope reverses the image, doesn't it?" I say that it does, and he goes "That's what I thought, because when you look at it like this the ring slants the opposite way." WTF!!! Looks like a dot to me! Anyway, that's my black cat story....

they have white and appaloosa whitetails here in West Virginia. Don't see why they can't have melanosis lions in Colorado.

Many years ago a government paid predator control agent shot a whitetailed lion in west Texas that weighted 135 pounds. I guess he was a piebalded lion.

Yeah, I was lucky enough to see a black mountain lion this summer. I was hunting wild boar near Paso Robles, CA.

I had already nailed a nice hog of around 300 pounds and we were trying to get my buddy one. We were driving on a ranch road headed for a different canyon to hunt when I happened to look out the side of the pickup.
Much to my surprise, there is this good sized coal black mountain lion running down the hill. We stopped and then my buddy saw it as it crossed another opening.

We talked to folks around there and they said that a few years ago there had been another black one hit and killed on a highway a few miles north of there.

R Flowers

Randy,glad you finally found a decent forum.
much better than anything else I have seen.
Lee

Where I grew up in south Alabama the typical color is alleged to be a charcoal gray. The one that I saw was the classic tawny color. It was bouncing across a beltway on the outskirts of my hometown not half a mile from student apartments and neighborhoods. I reported the sighting to some wildlife scientist because I had read that the Eastern Cougar was "thought to be" extinct but never even got a reply. Apparently wildlife biologists are not as observant as all the folks that I know who've seen one.