Cougar (Submitted photo / Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife)

A recent big cat sighting in Bend serves as a reminder that Central Oregon is cougar country.

The sighting off Brookswood Boulevard came the day after a mountain lion attacked a 6-year old boy in Cupertino, California, leading to national media coverage. The boy, who suffered puncture wounds and scratches, is out of the hospital, while the cougar that likely attacked him was tracked down and killed Wednesday, said Kirsten Macintyre, a spokeswoman for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“This cat had absolutely no fear of anybody,” she said. The boy’s family did not want him identified.

Similar behavior by a cougar here could also lead to it being killed. In Oregon, the law allows killing a mountain lion that appears to pose a threat to people, wildlife or pets, or if the animal is acting aggressively. While there are plenty of cougar encounters with livestock and pets, Oregon has been free of cougar attacks on people.

“We haven’t had a case of a wild cougar attacking a person in Oregon,” said Michelle Dennehy, spokeswoman for the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Last November, a captive cougar did kill a woman working at WildCat Haven, an animal sanctuary in Sherwood.

The big cat attacked and killed Renee Radziwon, 36, of Portland, as she was cleaning a cougar enclosure.

The cougar sighting in Bend Monday was along Buck Canyon Road, where the gravel road winds close to the Deschutes River. The runner who reported seeing the big cat around 7:45 a.m. Monday declined to be identified.

She reported the sighting to the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office, which passed word of it to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Wildlife managers didn’t go out to investigate the big cat because it wasn’t going after livestock or pets or acting aggressively toward people, said Corey Heath, Deschutes district biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife in Bend.

“We don’t take action every time everyone sees a cougar somewhere,” he said. “And by action I mean removing the cat.”

The number of cougars in the wild has increased dramatically over the past century in Oregon. Following decades of unregulated killing of the predators, which posed a risk to livestock, the mountain lion population was down to about 200 in the 1960s, Dennehy said. That decade the state Department of Fish and Wildlife reclassified cougars as a game animal, meaning there have since been hunting quotas and limits. The population has responded.

“We have nearly 6,000 cougars in Oregon today,” Dennehy said.

Hunters with a cougar tag this year are limited to one cougar each and a total of 777, according to state hunting guidelines.

Since 2007, the Department of Fish and Wildlife stopped keeping track of reported cougar sightings, in part because they aren’t always verified, and instead has focused on keeping data on mountain lions that have harmed or killed wildlife.

— Reporter: 541-617-7812, ddarling@bendbulletin.com