DuckSouth.com

woundedduck wrote:here we go again. i caught a mako shark in the pearl saturday. need help posting pics though.

woundedduck wrote:oh its so, mudsucker. i jes lost the pics and the vultures ate him. guess you are gonna have to take my word for it. must have been 14 feet long. had 4 labrador retrievers in his stomach with that volkswagon.

Panther spotter has photo to back up his sighting stories
By John Howell Sr.

Roy Durham has been seeing panthers near his home in the Enid Dam backwaters for over 20 years. This week he produced a photo that he said proves it.

Officials of the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks are skeptical.

That's been the official position of the state's wildlife experts for years. And for years people all over the state have claimed to have seen the elusive creatures.

"We get reports of panthers all year, ever since I was a kid", said Conservation Officer Supervisor Charlie Ingram. "We've never had any legible tracks or photos."

Durham took his photo last summer "when the ground was so hard that you'd have to put his paw down on the ground and hit it with a mallet to get a track," he said.

"I took one (photo) and then was going to make him look at me, so I whistled, and when I took the picture he was gone; I snapped the shot and got nothing." The tail of the feline in question is not visible in the photo, but it appears to drape over the opposite side of the limb over which its body is stretched. Durham said that when he has seen the cats at other times, a long tail has been visible. Once he saw the feline in his back yard, sitting on its haunches "like a little puppy."

"We've seen him a bunch of times," Durham added. And heard him. "When it screams it sounds like a woman, then kind of trails off," he said. He described the feline as "black as tar" and about 34 to 36 inches long.

That raises a flag for Richard Rummel of the Mississippi Museum Natural Science who said that the variety of panther that was once native to this part of Mississippi was a variation of the Florida panther. "There's never been a black one in North America," Rummel said.

There are some black variations among leopards and jaguars, Rummel said. "I've been checking on cat sightings for years," he added. The last sightings of Florida panthers in most southeastern states came around the beginning of the 20th century with some isolated sightings as late as the 1920s, Rummel continued.

John Audubon during his float trip down the Mississippi River to study and draw the flora and fauna wrote of encountering the panthers in the Coldwater River bottom.

"I feel like if we have any (panthers) in this state, somewhere somebody would have run over one, Ingram said.

70 sprig wrote:Y'all go on and laugh , this one's for real . The man that took the actual pic is my uncle's best bud , and they ain't drankin men ...............well , they are but they wasn't drankin when they saw it .

Said it was prolly close to ten feet long from nose to tail , said when it seen'em it snarled and showed it's 4 inch k-9's , then it let out a scream that sounded just like uncle floyd did the time they put the booster cables on his nipples . They use to always do stuff like that to each other til uncle floyd got eat by a killer whale while thay was huntin bigfoots up in washington state .

Anyway , y'all just go ahead and laugh , this one is the real deal , wait til you see them pics .