Wednesday, March 25, 2015

A BOBCAT IN THE BACKYARD

My husband, daughter and I live in a suburban area with lots of houses that have small  backyards. Surprisingly though,  we have seen a fox,  a mama and baby deer, skunks, ground hogs, hawks, turkey vultures, squirrels and lots of birds.  It's fun to still see all this wildlife even though we aren't in the woods.  
The other night, when my husband and I really should have been in bed, we were still up watching TV and suddenly heard a rather disturbing sound.  It was kind of like a cat fight/ baby cry/person screaming  .   Definitely a little unsettling late at night when it's dark and most of our neighbors were probably sleeping.   I felt pretty confident though, that it was an animal, so I was more excited to figure out what it was, then scared.     My husband and I opened windows to listen and turned on the outside lights to see if we could spot whatever it was.   My husband thinks he heard the same cry/scream faintly in the distance so whatever was near our house may have been responding.   Finally we opened the backdoor and flicked on the light again and my husband caught a quick glimpse of a very large cat jumping up onto our chain link fence  and then running off.    We decided that it was probably a bobcat.   The next morning,  since we still have snow on the ground ( UGH!!!) I went out and checked to see if our visitor left any prints.    Sure enough, there were some pretty big catlike prints near the fence and I could see them venturing off into the patch of trees in our neighbor's yard.    These confirmed what we thought, that it was most likely a bobcat and now I kinda wish it would come back so I could see it.  I Just want it to keep to the night time visits.

The prints on our side of the fence





Comparison of my hand verses the single print.  Much bigger then a house cat!




No comments:

Post a Comment