The federal government is reopening its file on the Eastern cougar as part of a long-overdue update on the whether the great “ghost cat” is creeping back into the forests of Maine and other East Coast states – if indeed it ever left.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that it is gathering scientific data from state wildlife agencies and other groups from Maine to South Carolina on the status of the Eastern cougar, also commonly known as the mountain lion or panther.

The agency is supposed to conduct status reviews of animals protected by the Endangered Species Act every five years. But due to scant resources, this is the first time the agency has updated the cougar’s status since 1982.

Once prevalent throughout the U.S., the Eastern mountain lion was driven to extinction in many states as humans either targeted the cats directly or killed off the large game that supported cougar populations.

Mountain lions continue to inhabit many Western states and, in recent years, have expanded their range into the Midwest. Encounters with humans, while still relatively rare, also appear to be on the increase in Western and Midwestern states.

The Eastern cougar’s official status with the federal government is “endangered.” However, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service continues to presume that the cat is extinct in Eastern states, based on lack of evidence and the improbability of a small population surviving in the East for more than a century.

But many people are not quite ready to write off the Eastern cougar.

Scores of people – including many here in Maine – have reported seeing cougar-like cats in forests up and down the East Coast. Witnesses have taken pictures of the cougars, collected scat or hair and other documentation. But the federal agency says that most of the confirmed post-1950 sightings were captive cats that escaped or were released.

Mark Latti, spokesman for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, said the state generally receives a handful of mountain lion sighting reports annually. In many cases, the sightings happened too long ago for biologists to collect any determining evidence, he said.

A few years ago, the department was able to cast a track of a large cat sighted in Monmouth.

“It’s difficult to say, but it was a very large cat,” Latti said.

Diana Weaver, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional office in Hadley, Mass., said the agency will primarily be gathering information from DIF&W and other wildlife agencies as well as from groups involved in cougar research.

“What we are looking for is more scientific evidence,” Weaver said. “We can’t base our findings on anecdotes.”

The department also posts accounts of citizen sightings of cougars on its Web site. Accounts can be emailed to CougarStories@fws.gov.

For more information on the agency’s update process for the cougar, go to http://www.fws.gov/northeast/ECougar/