Bobcat Said to Be Thriving (in my backyard)
We first spotted the creature in shadow, several years ago: a crouched figure, pointed tips for ears, sitting on the crest of the hill at dusk. A dark outline against the purple smudge of waning sunset. Too full bodied to be a fox. Too large to be a house cat.
Not long after, she revealed herself in full daylight—a bobcat, tawny and tufted, trotting across my mom and stepdad’s yard with a gnarled front paw that set her gait in a permanent identifying limp. She would be impossible to mistake for a feral domestic cat, not only because of her size or her pointed ears or her thick limbs or her eponymous bobbed tail, but also because of her intense and resolute stature, suggesting that even an attempt at taming would be met with dire consequences. She was so much closer to the big cats we are used to seeing on Planet Earth than the ones we are used to having curled up in our laps.
She was as wild as they come and so we assumed the sightings were singular, and counted ourselves lucky – what were the chances we would see her again?
It turns out, high: In the years since, we’ve seen the bobcat time and time again, with several litters of kittens in tow, with a squirrel in her mouth, with her sharp hunter’s gaze trained on the lawn and the woods and the ground-feeding birds. It's unclear what got the paw—a trap, a car, another predator—but even though every step looks painful, it clearly hasn’t stopped her, or even really slowed her down. She’s adapted, far better than any of us probably would down one limb and without medical care. And she is certainly better at catching prey than we are, with our commercial traps and opposable thumbs.
I grew up in the city which, save for a collection of resilient scavengers—think bold pigeons, beady-eyed seagulls, rats somersaulting over the third subway rail on a quest for a ragged pizza crust—means that my early experiences with wildlife were relatively anemic, sadly so for an animal-obsessed child like myself. My late-20s move to the country has somewhat shifted my barometer for awe: as a kid, spotting a deer on a hiking trip upstate was enough to keep me going for days. Now, spotting a deer usually means slamming on the brakes as a clutch of a dozen or so meander across the road, somehow still not having evolved the survival instinct to fear cars.
But this new life has also put me in the path of several creatures I’d never seen before: skunk, wild turkeys, pheasants, bears. Each sighting is a delight, but nothing has quite sparked the sort of wonder that the bobcat has. What is it about the bobcat, that seems to invoke the sublime — unnerving yet intoxicating, all at once?
Despite the fact that I live a 30-minute drive from an adequate grocery store and that the only business within walking distance is a whiskey distillery (blessed), there’s something in the air, in the cultivated land, in the countless farm stands and pick-your-own apple operations and small-batch breweries, that prevents the Hudson Valley from ever feeling all that wild. The bobcat, more than the skunks or the racoons or the foxes, seems like a glitch in the matrix. Shouldn’t you be in a jungle somewhere? Scaling an alpine tree? Why are you in my backyard, staring at me like maybe you could enlist a few friends and take me down for a hearty lunch?
As is perennially and unsurprisingly the case— we are the invaders. Bobcats are indigenous to Central and Southern New York. Like raccoons or foxes or even bears, they can easily live at the fringes of populated areas. They likely want to be near homes because of the greater prevalence of rodents—the squirrels attracted to my mom’s bird feeder, the mice rooting around the porous edges of the foundation as they try to find a way inside—but close enough to the woods that they can scurry away to their den.
The real moment of awe with our bobcat (she won’t be tamed or owned, but for these purposes we’ll claim her) came about a year after our first sighting, when she popped up in my own backyard. Two miles, several roads, a dozen houses and acres of woods, meadow and stream separate my house from my mom’s. And yet she—and now her kittens—regularly appear in both of our yards, traversing the region between our homes as regularly as we seem to, except she probably avoids the asphalt, instead slinking through brush and bramble, surreptitious and low to the ground. She is more often seen at my mom’s, where we think she keeps her main den back in the woods; she likely has auxiliary dens near my house, where she hunts or weekends or summers or drops off her kids when they’re annoying her (#secondhomegoals).
Bobkittens stay with their mothers for about a year (male bobcats, it seems, are not particularly devoted fathers). Her range is up to about 12 miles and adult bobcat territories rarely overlap, so once they’re grown, mama is likely sending her kittens hither and yon, off to establish their own territories to terrorize and hunt.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation website notes that “confirmed sightings” prove there is now a stable bobcat population in the central and southern areas of the state. But there are no solid numbers on an estimated population size. A “furbearer sighting” page on the DEC website allows people like myself to submit their own data on wildlife they’ve spotted. “Furbearer” is a cuter term for a group of animals that have been—or currently are—hunted commercially for fur.
In 1989, the New York Times ran an article addressing the then-presumably plummeting populations of bobcats and terrapin in the northeast. The article was titled “Bobcats and Terrapin Said to be Imperiled” and in a subsequent letter to the editor, Barbara Scott Jordan took umbrage at the headline’s passive language:
“What shall it benefit this 'status' when surviving bobcats are yanked from Maine and tossed into the Kittatinny Mountains area (1978-1983)? The glut of gun-toters, breathing hard, anticipating their growth in five years to 150? Oh! Goody-goody-bang-bang!
If these mammals have an average home range of 12 square miles, limitations - i.e., habitat loss - would decimate them too.
Of the diamond-backed terrapin, my knowledge is as brief as its lessening life, but my compassion, considerable.”
Letters to the editor, I feel, are an art mostly lost, eaten away by the cesspool of the comments section. Sure, you might find a comment with the flourishes and personality and perfect level of derangement of a classic letter to the editor, but you’ll have to wade through diatribes and non sequiturs on Q and “Megan Markle is a demon sent to kill us” and “I EARNED 60,000 DOLLARS IN THREE DAYS ON THE INTERNET HERE'S HOW.”
Barbara’s frustration and fear was that the bobcat’s imperiled status was being downplayed, that hunters and trappers were just chomping at the bit, waiting for population numbers to inch up just a bit so they might continue their rampage on unsuspecting furbearers all over the land.
I don’t know where Barbara is now (hopefully still writing!). But I wish I could reassure her that, 30 years later, the bobcat appears to be alive and thriving—fucked up paw and all—at least in my backyard.