Cougar sighting in West Chicago?

Jill DeRobertis was cruising down Roosevelt Road on her way to work Tuesday morning when she spotted a coyote.

No big deal, really. Coyotes are almost as common as drugstores these days, and finding one where DeRobertis found hers - near the DuPage Airport between Kress and Kautz roads in West Chicago - is hardly unusual.

But that's when things took one those Animal Planet turns, because she had traveled only another 100 feet or so when she spied what appeared to be a large cat with a very long tail that looked for all the world like a cougar.

This was about 7 a.m. and the Naperville woman was rolling along at a fairly good clip, but she's pretty certain it was one of the shadowy cats.

"I swear, nothing else could have a tail like that," she said.

DeRobertis says the animal had its head down as if it was either eating or playing with something. She couldn't be dead-solid-certain about the cat's color - it looked more gray than the traditional brown one would expect - "but it was just the tail that got me."

DeRobertis reported the incident to West Chicago police and a spokeswoman said patrol officers have been asked to keep an eye out for the creature. So far, though, there have been no other sightings.

"I don't know if I'm going crazy," said DeRobertis, who's willing to poke a little fun at herself, "but I don't know how nobody else could have seen it."

She's not the first person in DuPage County to report seeing a cougar this fall. There were two highly publicized cases in September in Wheaton, but experts said they turned out to be false alarms.

Cougars haven't regularly roamed Illinois since the 1870s and confirmed sightings are extremely rare, said Dan Ludwig, regional wildlife biologist for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

Three such cats have been found in Illinois since 2000, Ludwig said. One one was struck by a train in 2002, one was killed by a bowhunter in 2004 and one was shot by Chicago police in Chicago last year.

Cougars are by nature elusive, experts say, and for a sighting to be deemed legitimate usually takes physical evidence such as photographs, tracks or signs of a kill by the animal.

"People see a lot of things," Ludwig said, "they don't necessarily see cougars."

DeRobertis, who works for R.R. Donnelly in St. Charles, knows people will be skeptical, but she also knows what she saw. And for now, at least, she's convinced there's a good chance it was a cougar.

With that in mind she returned to the scene during her lunch break Tuesday to see if she could catch another glimpse of the animal, but with no luck.

"I did see a gopher along the road," she said with a smile in her voice, "and was a little concerned he would meet an untimely end."