Wild Things: Bobbing for bobcats

The elusive bobcat. ED KANZE PHOTO

By ED KANZE

When I was in elementary school, a popular activity at children’s birthday parties was bobbing for apples. Anyone remember it? Bobbing for apples involved a tub of water in which apples were floated by whatever grownups were hosting the festivities. One kid at a time had to dunk his or her face in the water and try to snatch up an apple using nothing more than teeth. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t sanitary and you didn’t stay dry, but apple bobbing was silly and fun.

For me, finding a bobcat to photograph with a good camera and sharp lens has presented an even more vexing challenge than apple-bobbing. Through most of my years of trial and failure (and I’ve been trying all my adult life), I felt no confidence I would ever succeed. All the same, like a stubborn or hopeful kid kneeling beside a tub full of apples, I kept on trying. 

Once a bobcat turned up right outside our kitchen window. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the kitchen. I wasn’t even in the house. I was working on a piece of writing in my office in an outbuilding. My wife gave the play-by-play on the intercom. The cat sat, the cat groomed itself, the cat eventually stood up and looked around. After Debbie and the kids had had their fill, I chanced leaving my office. Step by step, I moved slowly back to the house. Just before the cat might have come into view, it sauntered into the woods. The bobcat didn’t bolt. It just walked calmly away. Debbie and the kids had good looks at the abbreviated tail, the bobbed tail, that gives the animal its name.

Last winter into spring, I spent months putting out beaver and muskrat carcasses given to me by two trappers. I felt a bit like Dr. Frankenstein as I put out corpses, hoping to reel in a bobcat to pose before my camera. I tried three locations: one in woods near our house where a bobcat had visited in the past, one on a riverbank bobcats follow upstream and down, and one at the edge of a big white cedar swamp where whitetail deer “yard up” in the winter, and where, according to the books, bobcats prowl and pick off the sick, the starving, and the dying.

Nothing worked. These animals patrol enormous territories (male bobcats in northern New York where I live may defend home ranges of more than 120 square miles), and the chances of attracting the attention of one in a given place are not high. I spent at least 40 hours sitting in blinds. Often I slipped in during the dark hour before dawn, the time when winter nights are the coldest. No bobcat ever walked in front of my camera. Ravens, fishers and gray foxes devoured the offerings, and once a rough-legged hawk dropped in for a quick snack. The only bobcat photo I succeeded in obtaining was hauled in by my trail camera. It’s just a single image, and the quality is poor. But there, on the last day of April for just a moment, appeared a real wild feline.

This especially cold, snowy winter, my long, frustrating career of bobbing for bobcats and staggering home empty-handed, half-frozen, finally yielded the results I’d been hoping for. I set up a stakeout near deer parts left behind by a hunter I know. A bobcat came. My trail cam grabbed a few photos, and then the animal vanished, not to return for another month. This pattern repeated itself until the snow grew deep and the temperature stayed cold. Then the cat began to linger.

On the game-changing day, I was sitting in my blind peering out at trees and snow when suddenly I realized a bobcat was sitting a few feet away. I had not seen it arrive. One moment I was looking at the same old scene, and the next, the view had a bobcat in it. A bobcat! I could hardly believe my luck.