Great Morning

On a beautiful fall morning I headed to the Big Woods to walk a couple of old roads. Down the road from my parking place there was a small dark figure in the road. The camera's telephoto lens showed what, at first glance, appeared to be another one of the house cats that plague the natural world.

But then it moved and was revealed to be a bobcat. At that point I was about 1,000 feet from the intersection where the bobcat had been surveying its surroundings. I walked closer very, very slowly; the bobcat turned and unhurriedly ran down the road –

When it made a sharp turn, crouched and headed toward a thick patch of foxtail grass I realized that it hadn’t been frightened but was instead hunting a small mammal or bird in the grass –

It had disappeared in the grass, so I kept walking toward where it vanished. Suddenly it dashed across the road – faster than I could react – and disappeared in the brushy woods.

At the intersection I stood partially concealed behind a large tree and began making a series of squeaks mimicking an injured mouse. It wasn’t long before there was movement in the brush. Then all was still – and then a bit more movement. After a few minutes there was a shape discernible; while my eyes’ 3D vision could pick out the shape, the camera with 2D could not. Using my best estimate of where to aim, I took a few photos –

If you can’t find the well camouflaged bobcat, here it is –

Apparently it realized something wasn’t right because it silently disappeared back in the brush. A minute or so later there it was, heading down the other old road at the intersection where a few squeaks caused it to stop and look back –

Then it turned and walked further down the road –

More squeaks brought it to a stop once again, and again it looked back –

And with that it turned away and went back into the brushy woods, not to be seen again, and I resumed my walk.

Interestingly, this encounter with a bobcat was only a couple of hundred feet from the spots where I photographed a bobcat in 20o9 and again in 2011 –

H and I saw a bobcat in an adjacent grassy field about ten years before that. The location with it's mix of brushy forest, mature woodland and grassy field apparently remains ideal bobcat habitat.