Black cougar caught in photo?

If there really is a black cougar prowling Don Callen's woodlands near Forestville, it's a bona fide feline phenomenon.

Such a creature may exist, experts say, but there has never been a documented sighting of a black cougar, also known as a mountain lion or puma.

And the furry shape in the two photographs captured 50 feet from Callen's stationary digital camera might just be a black house cat, as common as a crow.

Two experts who've seen Callen's photos flatly declared the images are inconclusive.

Callen, a Santa Rosa custom home builder and remodeler, admitted that he's skeptical, too.

"It's like getting a picture of Bigfoot," he said.

But Callen insists, based on reconnoitering the scene on his 52-acre property, that the cat would have come up to his midthigh. "He's definitely a big cat," Callen said.

"It's definitely enticing," said Jack Dumbacher, a curator at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who viewed the photos Friday.

But he and Rob Dicely, who runs an exotic cat preserve in Occidental, said the image is too blurred and the lighting too low to make a species-positive identification.

"It could be (a black cougar)," said Dicely, whose 19-cat collection, called Leopards, Etc., includes a mountain lion named Shoshone. "That's about as far as you can take it."

It could also be a black house cat, black bobcat or a black panther, and it could have escaped from or been released by a pet owner, Dumbacher said.

Mountain lions, which roam from Canada to South America, come in shades from light tan to dark brown, which could "easily be mistaken for black," Dicely said.

Callen said he's shown the photos to dozens of folks, and heard several accounts of big black cat sightings from west county to Petaluma.

"I'm dying to have someone look at it and say, 'Hey, you've got one,' " Callen said.

Mountain lion sightings and attacks on livestock occur several times a year in Sonoma County, and a 70-year-old man was mauled by a lion last year in Humboldt County, the most recent documented attack on a human being.

Callen's photos were snapped by a surveillance camera tied to a tree on the mornings of March 13 and April 5. The camera's still in place, and both experts said they'd love to see clearer images.

"That would be a really exciting find, if that's what it was," Dumbacher said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.