A few years ago one was seen a few miles from my house near the Mohawk Valley of New York - two co-workers saw the cat on two separate occasions about 20 miles apart. I had recently changed jobs and they didn't know each other. There were two explainations - an exotic cat that was released (apparently there are hundreds of privately licensed large cats in the state, one african cat was road killed a few years back in the northern Adirondacks, so that is a plausable explanation.) The other is that the cats were just passing through.

Time was the big cats were pretty common - a few boys were killed by cats while walking the mules on the Erie Canal back in the 1820's and my grandfather had a few encounters back in the 1920s. I just had a conversation with my grandmother (age 102) and she described seeing some on the farm back in the early 40's. The men were all out hunting and nobody believed her until a male neighbor verified her story. They are definately "native" to the east (Catskill = Cats Creek), just not many anymore.

An interesting aside - my grandfather shot a wolf in the Adirondacks back in 1957 and collected a bounty of $50 from the state - thing is that all of the history books show the "last wolf in the Adirondacks" killed in 1857, a hundred years earlier. I have pictures of it hanging with my older sister by its side.