KWWL.com - News & Weather for Waterloo, Dubuque, Cedar Rapids & Iowa City, Iowa | Cedar Rapids man shoots, kills mountain lion near Marengo

Cedar Rapids man shoots, kills mountain lion near Marengo

AMANA (KWWL) - There was a crowd gathered Tuesday at a rural Amana home, and for a good reason. As Ray Goebel was in the final stretch of a Monday evening deer hunt, he spotted a mountain lion.

"I just happened to look over my left shoulder and it was sitting in a tree, and I put my scope on it," said Goebel, as he held the deceased animal.

It weighs approximately 125 pounds, and is more than six feet long from nose to tail. Goebel called around to make sure it was legal to shoot the big cat. He watched it for nearly an hour before pulling the trigger.

"I didn't believe it at first, and then I just kept looking for deer," Goebel recalled. That's when I pulled my scope and was like, 'it is what iIthought I saw.'"

Joe Wilkinson, an information specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, says mountain lions are not classified as game animals, so there's no seasonal restrictions for hunting them. He tells us this is a rare find. Only three mountain lions have been killed in Iowa in the past decade, according to DNR records.

"We've had confirmed sightings here, and we've had trail camera sightings, they're just not quite as common as people think," Wilkinson told us.

His office gets a few calls of sightings every month, which often turn out to be false.

"If we find a print that's a canine print, or we find a large dog, or a bobcat quite often, which is quite small compared to a mountain lion."

Goebel plans to have the animal stuffed, which will cost him around $1,500. At first, he thought the lion was a female, which Wilkinson says would have been even more rare. However, a DNR biologist later confirmed it to be a male.

Online Reporter - Brady Smith