NATCHEZ — When Paul Havens and his wife Penny showed up to work on Monday morning they ran into an unexpected critter visiting their worksite.

The Havens said when they arrived at the Entergy substation, at the Johns Mansville site, they saw an animal they believe to be a cougar.

“I said ‘Look, what is that,’” Penny Havens said.

While Penny said she didn’t immediately recognize the creature, it took her husband only a moment to make an identification.

“For a second I though it was a bobcat” Paul Havens said. “Then I realized it was too big to be a bobcat.”

And while Paul calls the big cat a panther, not a cougar, he said he positive of what he saw.

Havens is from Singer, La., and said he has seen enough panthers in that area to know what he saw.

Havens said as he walked around the rear of the substation he noticed the big cat laying on the ground.

“As I got closer it got up and started to walk away,” he said.

The area where Havens saw the cat is a flat field with low grass.

Havens said as he continued to approach the cat it quickened its pace and eventually ran off into the woods.

And Havens was able to notice one detail about the cat that no other cougar spotters have mentioned before.

“It has a fat belly,” he said. “Either it just ate a big meal or it’s pregnant.”

And while it hasn’t happened yet, the Mississippi Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is planning to send a representative to look for evidence of the creature.

The department’s exotic species program leader Richard Rummel said he hopes to travel to Natchez early next week to search the local woods for any evidence of the creature.

When he arrives, he’ll also be examining a partially eaten deer carcass, now housed in a local freezer, to see if it was attacked by a cougar.

While the area’s first alleged cougar sighting happened on Briel Avenue in the summer, in recent weeks several people claimed to have seen the animal between the first and third mile marker on the Natchez Trace.

The small area in which the previous Trace sightings had occurred prompted some to believe that the cougar was inhabiting that particular area because of it’s deer population.

And that theory could be gaining some credence because Monday’s sighting isn’t far from the Trace sightings.