Beasts of the Forest – Cougars, Coyotes, and Deer in Pacific Spirit Park
Updated: Sep 3
On December 4th, 2024 there was what might have been a Cougar sighting in Pacific Spirit Park near St. George’s School. The alleged sighting happened near the south-eastern Park boundary. Then, so after, on December 26 there was another alleged sighting, just outside of the forest, in the Dunbar Neighbourhood alongside eastern Park boundary. You can read the December 31, 2024 GlobalNews report on these two sightings here: Two cougar sightings in a month reported in urban Vancouver neighbourhood
The below sign went up in Pacific Spirit:
City Officials and Experts were – rightly! – skeptical of these claims that it was an actual cougar. There were no other sightings. Both witnesses only caught brief glimpses. Consider for instance reports of Cougar spotted in a nearby Vancouver neighbourhood, Shaughnessy in May 2022. This ‘Cougar’ turned out to just be an escaped Savannah Cat. One the biggest domestic cats in the world and can grow to be 43 centimetres tall.
Cougars are also confused with Coyotes. Once I was walking in the Jericho Park Forest and I turned a trail corner, I almost jumped out of my pants. This black, large - waist-high- creature on four legs quickly disappeared into the forest. My mind jumped to Cougar immediately because of its dark fur and height. Then I reconsidered and thought it was just someone’s large pet dog. Perhaps a Huskie? However, as it ran away, I realized it was actually a Coyote.
I would like to introduce you to Darko. A large, black furred coyote that has been living in Jericho and Pacific Spirit Park for the last few years.
A friend of mine, Nathan Lewis, is doing his PhD on Coyotes at UBC, and it is thanks to him I was able to realize this was a coyote not a dog. Coyotes can actually look quite deceptively like dogs. But Nathan has given me some helpful tips for immediately telling them apart.
Consider the below photo from a presentation Nathan gave for Nature Vancouver. Can you tell if these two creatures are coyotes or dogs?
While the dark coyote on the right looks more 'doglike', it is actually a coyote. Nathan fooled me with this the first time he showed it to me. I thought it was a dog!
There a few tricks for telling coyotes and dogs apart which you can see in the photo from Nathan’s presentation below. The most useful one for me is the tail shape. Coyotes always have dangling tails, unlike dogs. Dogs usually move and bend their tails upwards. Darko's dangling, busy tail gave him away as a coyote.
Darko may also be the offspring of a dog and coyote parents. Which would explain where Darko gets his big size and dark fur from. These canines from two different worlds are often called Coydogs. There is some evidence to suggest they can be more aggressive than regular coyotes because their dog genes make them more habituated and less scared of humans. They become more brazen, attacking larger and large creatures.
Vancouver has a famous dog-hybrid story! One of my favourite to tell on Nathan and my Nighttime Forest Predator Walks. The story of the Beast of Bowen. A story that seems like it should come from the 1800s but made news headlines across Canada when it happened in 2011.
Let me set the scene!
In early 2011 reports began coming in from Bowen Island (an island located a 20 minute ferry trip from West Vancouver) of a large amount of animals being killed by a mysterious creature. Known just by locals as ‘The Beast’. Cats, dogs, chickens, sheep, deer, and even a swan were killed by the Beast. It became more and more brazen and it soon no longer hid it’s hunting from humans. Often killing animals right in front of humans. Showing no fear at all.
There is one story of the Beast staring down someone as it ate their dog in front of them. The man paralyzed in fear whether to run away and risk being chased or to try and save his dog and risk being attacked and eaten as well.
The Beast was half Wolf and half dog. Believed to be a dog-wolf hybrid that someone had brought as a puppy to the island, unaware of its wolf heritage. Raised by humans, it lost all fear of them.
As the Beast got more and more brazen, there were worries that it would eventually go after a human child. And so, ‘Trapper Al’, a 72 year old trapper named Allan Starkey, was brought in to kill it. Al was awed with the intelligence of the creature, saying it did not have the fear a regular wolf would have and that it would either be caught quickly, or not at all.
At 6:30am on May 2011, using some beaver castor, coyote bait, and a carcass to attract the Beast, Al killed it with a single shot. It weighed 42 kilograms – the weight of at least two, maybe three, coyotes – and Al said he could barely fit it into his truck.
There is your campfire story next time you are camping in British Columbia!
Bowen Island is no stranger to predators. The island is packed with habituated deer that often seem to have no fear of humans or other predators. This makes the Beast of Bowen story all the better to tell when walking home in the dark on Bowen Island! It is very likely you will turn a corner and suddenly see a large creature - a deer! - that will give you a good fright.
Bowen Island is currently home to two bears and one cougar that have swam over to the island. The cougar I am particularly interested in, because if a cougar did visit Pacific Spirit Park, it was likely the Bowen Island Cougar. Bowen locals have affectionately dubbed their cougar, Whiskey, and he/she is big!
I particularly love the below photo of Whiskey mean mugging the camera:
Whiskey has been on Bowen Island since at least July 2024, which was when the first surveillance video of it was taken.
In recent decades new research has made us reconsider just how good long distance swimmers Cougars are. Especially in the Salish Sea alongside British Columbia where they often 'island hop' to catch prey.
It’s possible that Whiskey took a 'brief' trip from Bowen and made a short stop in Vancouver in December 2024. On Bowen they found a large food source -Deer!- and decided to stay.
There had not been any concerning interactions with Whiskey and Bowen Islanders until this recent summer. Cougars are known as ‘ghost cats’ and usually remain out of sight of humans. They are often hidden and watching us, waiting for us to leave so that they can move.
One of my favourite cougar videos is this one I came across on Reddit of a man enjoying his hike and then suddenly noticing, up high in the tree, there is a perfectly camouflaged cougar, silently watching him.
Whiskey has started to get a bit more confident around humans. This summer he has began attacking sheep. Which has worried Bowen Islanders because it is starting to sound like a similar story to the Beast of Bowen! The Beast slowly started attacking animals closer and closer to humans.
The ‘friendly’ Bowen Island Deer still seem to be the main draw for Whiskey and his bear pals though. That is the reason why those three swam out to Bowen and remain there.
If Whiskey did visit Pacific Spirit Park, it makes sense he would leave quickly after finding no deer. The last deer population in Pacific Spirit vanished in the mid-1980s. It is the same for Stanley Park, the deer populations there have also vanished.
While there is lots of forested area and food sources for deer. Pacific Spirit Park does not make good deer habitat because of how popular it is for recreation (especially dogs!) and the roads that intersect and separate areas of the park.
However, we do see appearances by Deer on occasion that swim up across the Fraser.
We had one of these just last summer, August 2025, where a Doe was caught on a trailcam In the Jericho Park Forest by the UBC Animal Behaviour and Cognition Lab.
This Doe travelled through Pacific Spirit with multiple sightings and then went down to Jericho Beach Park where it spent another couple weeks in the forest. Unclear where it went after that or if it was killed by coyotes!
Just after our Doe vanished, there was a deer being spotted in downtown Vancouver. Interestingly, this ‘Downtown Deer’ was a clearly a Buck, a male deer, because of its antlers and so it was a different deer then the Doe that was travelling through Pacific Spirit and Jericho.
This ‘Downtown Deer’ quickly went viral, with people being stunned how unfazed it seemed to be by humans getting close to it.
Once again we are unsure of what happened to this deer. However it reminds me of another ‘Downtown Deer’ that visited in July 2015 and had a tragic ending.
The 2015 Deer appears to have swum over from the North Shore and caused a lot of attention. You can find lots of videos online of people petting and feeding this deer who became completely habituated to humans.
It was then hit and killed by car beside Lions Gate Bridge on September 13th, 2026. Nick Page, a biologist with the Vancouver Park Board, but the blame solely on the feet of those that fed her. The deer became dependent and lost its fear of humans and cars.
This is the ultimate deterrent for any deer that wants to try to live in a Vancouver Park! They become instant celebrities with people following them around, taking photos, and feeding them. And then, once this deer becomes comfortable with us, we kill it accidentally.
If we did want to practice some rewilding and reintroduce deer to the Pacific Spirit Park and Stanley Park, we should approach deer in a similar way we approach coyotes, by not being overly-familiar and scaring them away when they get to close. We would also need to have less road intersecting parks and less trails. That is, have more areas with less human disturbance.
Could perhaps Whiskey have swam over to Pacific Spirit Park to hunt a stray deer?
I have my own biases here of course! Having a cougar visit Pacific Spirit is extremely cool and I do desperately want it to be true. However, the evidence is very little.
I do have one more piece of evidence to add though! Just a few days ago, on one of Nathan and mine Nighttime Forest Walks, one of the participants told a fascinating story. That she had been walking through Pacific Spirit Park and heard an ‘unearthly’ scream coming from somewhere in the woods. She thought it could be perhaps a human, but if it was a human, then something extremely terrible was happening to them. It sounded like something else. Something non-human.
A few days later, she came across the news reports of a Cougar being spotted in the Park, and when she looked up the sound of a cougar scream, it matched exactly the kind of scream she had heard!
So maybe we did get a Cougar visitor after all?
One more piece of evidence! It looks like we also might have had already one visit the Park in July 2004 according the below The Province Newspaper Article.
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To read about Nathan's research about why Coyotes suddenly started attacking everyone in Stanley Park during the Pandemic, check out this article. You can also follow Nathan's research on Predators on his very informative Instagram: @fieldnotesbynathan
Nathan and I will have another Predator Walk coming up soon!
