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The eastern cougar was officially declared extinct in 2018. And when he met my wife and I he said that he just didn’t have time to pull together all the mammal data and asked if we were interested in doing that. He coauthored a book on the reptiles and amphibians of the Smokies. He wrote a book on the birds of the Smokies, the trees and woody shrubs of the Smokies. Arthur Stupka was the very first park biologist, and he was near retirement age and in fact he actually had retired, but he kept a journal for 28 years and he stayed on to write up the notes from that journal. thesis on the golden mouse in the park and for a while I was considered the expert in the whole country on that little mouse. I worked as a park ranger naturalist for the Smokies for several summers while I was doing my Ph.D. What initially drew you to focus your research on the Smokies? But the government’s assertion that mountain lions are long gone from the mountains hasn’t stopped countless reports of mountain lion sightings, or discouraged Linzey’s ongoing search for evidence of the giant cat’s presence. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the eastern cougar subspecies from the endangered species list in order to “correct a lingering anomaly” that listed the species despite its having disappeared forever at least 70 years go. For much of that time, he’s cultivated a special interest in an animal that’s achieved almost mythic status in the minds of many mountain residents-the mountain lion. Donald Linzey holds a deer mouse captured for analysis and later released.ĭon Linzey-a wildlife biologist and professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation-has been studying mammals in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for 54 years.