D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April 2011
The Bobcat’s Tale
Opportunistic, resilient and resourceful, the bobcat has adapted to living in almost every habitat across the US — including southwest New Mexico.
by Jay Sharp
The face of the bobcat has always reminded me of the round, mischievous, smiling face of Mickey Rooney, that venerable show-business personality of motion pictures, stage and television. Mickey Rooney — adaptable, opportunistic, resilient and resourceful — staked out a six-decade career that brought him fame in every corner of the nation. The bobcat — adaptable, opportunistic, resilient and resourceful — established a lifestyle that led to a presence in virtually every habitat across the continental United States.
 |
Rescued bobcat. All photos by Denise Miller. |
The mature adult bobcat (Lynx rufus) — roughly twice the size of a typical house cat — measures about three to three and a half feet in length, from the tip of its nose to the end of its bobbed tail. It stands about a foot and a half to two feet high at the shoulder. Muscular, it usually weighs about 15 to 30 pounds, although, rarely, it may reach 40 pounds or more. Of the bobcats he studied in south-central New Mexico, Robert L. Harrison of the University of New Mexico wrote, "On average, males were 39.1% heavier and 13.7% longer than females."
The bobcat’s coat varies in color and pattern. Generally, its base color ranges from buff to grayish. It has a camouflaging mix of spots and bars. Often it may have rows of spots along its body and dark bars across its neck, forelegs and tail. It has lighter-colored underparts, often decorated with spots and bars. Overall, our bobcats in the Southwest have the lightest-colored coats of all the bobcat subspecies. Distinctively, every bobcat has a black tip on the top of its tail.
The bobcat’s face has light, barred ruffs of hair along the cheeks, beneath the erect ears, giving it a rounded appearance. It has a striped forehead, yellowish eyes, a reddish pink nose and, often, black-tipped ears. Typical of predatory mammals, it has acute senses of vision, smell and hearing. Like all cats, it has whiskers that it uses to feel its way through dark passageways — for instance, an animal burrow. Should its whiskers touch a mouse, it can, like any other cat, react "with the speed and precision of a mousetrap," wrote Vitus B. Dröscher in The Magic of the Senses.
The bobcat has longer back legs than front legs, facilitating its agility and quickness, its ability to pounce on prey. Its running strides may cover four to eight feet. It has four toes on its front paws and four on its rear paws. Its toes all have retractable claws, sparing the wear that would otherwise dull the sharp points. Walking or running, its back pawprints fall directly atop, or in "register" with, its front pawprints. Its coincident prints measure about two inches wide, with no claw marks. The bobcat’s trail, according to James A. MacMahon in Deserts, one of the Audubon Society Nature Guides, looks almost as if it has been left by a two-legged animal.
Altogether, the bobcat has 12 subspecies, with L. rufus baileyi being the one that occurs in our corner of the country.
Reflecting its supreme adaptability, the bobcat, writes Kevin Hansen in Bobcat: Master of Survival, "inhabits more of North America than any other native wild feline." It has taken residence in nearly all of the lower 48 states as well as much of southern Canada and most of northern Mexico — a range that extends from as far north as Nova Scotia and central British Columbia to as far south as Oaxaca and from as far east as the Atlantic coast to as far west as the Pacific coast.
 |
The bobcat’s preferred habitats, while variable, share several characteristics, according to Hansen, including "sufficient prey, dense cover, protection from severe weather, availability of rest areas, availability of den sites, and freedom from disturbance." It finds suitable habitat in, for instance, desert grass and shrub lands, riverine areas, forests, swamp lands, citrus groves and even urban neighborhoods and parks. (Several years ago, animal control authorities captured a bobcat in downtown Houston.) The bobcat especially favors transitional zones — for example, from grasslands to forests or old growth to new growth — "ecotones" that offer more diverse choices of prey and protection.
In New Mexico, according to the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, the bobcat may make its home from the sandy basins of the desert floor to the Alpine forests of the higher mountain ranges. In Harrison’s UNM study, set in Sierra County, the subject bobcats occupied Chihuahuan Desert scrub lands and grass lands.
 |
The bobcat — a restless, solitary, wide-ranging soul — sees its territory much as Ernest Hemingway viewed Paris back in the 1920s: as a moveable feast. Its territory may span several square miles, with the area defined by availability and movement of prey, quality of habitat and locations of natural boundaries. A ferocious battler, a bobcat will not share its territory with another of the same sex, according to Timothy Mallow, writing for the Coryi Foundation website, but it will permit some overlap with a cat of the opposite sex. It marks the perimeter and interior of its territory with tree scratches, ground scrapes, urine and fecal matter. It marks its territory both to protect sources of prey and to avoid competitive and injurious battles with other bobcats. A female takes special care in choosing her territory because she has to have the denning and foraging resources necessary to shield, protect and feed her litters.