Photograph taken in west Quebec could be of a cougar

A farmer in west Quebec isconvinced a hidden game camera installed on his property captured a photo of a cougar.

Before hunting season began, hunter Maxime Servant spread out apples and rigged up a game camera to takeimages of deer. The camera,triggered by a motion sensor, caught what appears to be the back of a large, tawny brown or beige coloured animal with a long, thicktail.

Although the camera was tripped in September,the image only came to light recently after Servant checked the device's memory card.

"Sure looks like a cougar to me," said Jimmy Hoare, thedairy farmer whose property Servant used inGrenville-sur-la-Rougeto set up his camera.

Two photographs date stamped 6:21 p.m. ET onSeptember 25 show the same animal moving away from the lensacross an area baited with apples. Hoaresays the images haven't been altered or edited in any way.

Exchangeable Image File Format -- or EXIF -- data accompanying the picture matches that of others gathered from the same memory card installed in the game camera. The device was screwed to a cherry tree about 10 metres beyond the rear edge of the cornfield at the farm.

The apple bait seems to have become popular with wildlife over the months of September and October.The camera captured daytime and night-time images of white-tailed deer, a fox, a hawk and the golden beige animal in question.

Hoare, a third generation farmer on the mountainous land that fringes the edge of a tall escarpment, says the landscapefits the bill."You're not far, you have a little tunnel underneath the [highway]50 here and it's miles and miles of nothing," he said.

Turkeys, deer, coyotes and wolves are frequently seen in the area around his farm said Hoare.

Two years ago, his wife Cheryl noticed tracks in the mud that she believedmatched images of cougar prints she found when she researched the mystery onthe internet.

"It says that the nails retract, they don't show the nails in the print and there's three lobes in the back. It was probably three to four inches in diameter," she said.

"My dog can leave a good-sized paw print, but this was bigger than my dog's."

The photographs that Hoare captured have been forwarded to conservation authorities.HugoPilon, an officer with Quebec's Ministry of Natural Resources and Wildlife, said although the animal appears to be a cougar an official determination hasn't been made.

However, a 2014 study by aUniversity of Montreal biologistconfirmed the presence of cougars in Quebec.

'You're always looking up and looking down'

Hoareis now linking the alleged cougar sightingto the recent death of one of his dairy calves, which was born about a week premature andfound deadin the field a couple of weeks before Servant's photo was taken.

"Not ate-up, but gutted out. So, I don't know what it was," he said.

Hoare said the sound of coyotes can be heard around the farm at night andthey may be the culprits.

Still, he and his family arecautious about the possibility of cougars nearby and have changed their habits.

"You're always looking up and looking down if you walk around in the bush. Cougars are known to pounce."

Meanwhile, Quebec Wildlife officials told Servantthey plan to return to the area where his photographs were taken to set up a post, baited with female cougar urine, in order to get a better photograph and DNA samples of the animal.

They're also urging local hunters, who may have similar pictures from a game camera, to comeforward.