Possible Mountain Lion In Eureka Area

The possible newest McPherson County resident is taking a lot of people by surprise. Multiple reports have come in about a big cat near Eureka.

Bonnie Serr was not expecting to see what she did.

"Right away I even thought to myself, 'Am I going to tell anybody because they're going to think I'm crazy,'" Serr said.

Serr was driving down a back road near Eureka a couple weeks ago when she noticed something unusual in the ditch.

"When he turned around and he ran into a corn field, it was the tail that really struck my eye,” Serr said. “It was just a huge tail.  Very, very thick and it curled up on the end. And I could just tell by what I saw, it was a mountain lion."

Then the local newspaper reported Serr’s sighting.

"People called me, stopped me on the street, whatever, and said 'I saw one too; I saw one too,'” Serr said. “So there've been many, many sightings."

There was a possible sighting as recently as this weekend. A man was picking up his kids from a farm about 20 miles from Eureka when he saw what he thought was a mountain lion run from one field to another.

The McPherson County Sheriff says there have been multiple reports of mountain lion sightings, but doesn't know if any of them have been verified by Game, Fish & Parks. Still, Serr is confident there's at least one around.

"I Googled it and the picture I saw I knew, I knew what I saw. I saw a mountain lion," Serr said.

Although it's not a typical home for a mountain lion, the sheriff says it's not unheard of to have one make its way through McPherson County either.

Review 2011 Mountain Lion sightings in South Dakota.