by Tim Homan
Middle of February, 2003, rural Madison County in Georgia's Piedmont. I stepped out onto our back deck at about ten-thirty in the morning to look at Brushy Creek, to check its depth and speed and color down the sunset slope from our home. The green under gray slope -- mountain laurel beneath winter-stripped oaks, white and northern red -- is steep for Piedmont topography. I stood at the back railing and watched as the South Fork Broad River tributary ran full and fast and red clay orange-brown from last night's heavy rainfall. No chance of spotting a gaudy male Wood Duck cruise by today.
The assumed canid walks slowly, deliberately, like it is trailing scent. I get the best look yet. The animal has no tail, at least not one that counts. I am staring at an incoming bobcat, but I can't quite believe it. I focus on the small laurel-free patches in its line of travel. There it is again, this time out in the open and still in no hurry. It stops, sniffs the base of an American holly sapling. No doubt now, it's a large and long-legged bobcat. A large and long-legged tom bob right down the slope and across the creek from our back deck: lottery-winning luck.
The wildcat keeps angling toward the stream. I stand heron still. The cat slowly walks out into the open and sits down on a thatch of discarded brown leaves right on top of the creek bank. He sits 35 yards line of sight down and away, and he still hasn't spotted me yet. I know I shouldn't move, but I want to tell Page about the bobcat so she can have a look at him. I slowly turn close to halfway around so I can look through the mostly glass double doors into the dining room and kitchen. No Page.
When I look down again the predator's head is raised and his eyes are casually assessing mine for danger. I expect the mid-level carnivore to break eye contact, lope off, break my sightline. But he doesn't move a muscle. Everything about his body language signals relaxed confidence, like we are two neighbors about to start a conversation across the creek. I do not fit his predator pattern, not a wolf pack or a panther, and I'm not showing the slightest sign of aggression. But I am eye-balling him, and most of Mother Nature's wildlings are hyper aware of being eye-balled.
I break eye contact and leave the deck to find Page. She is out in the front yard and comes running when I tell her what's across the creek. Page brakes to slow motion before she enters the open porch; we both walk slowly out to the railing. The male bobcat is still there and still calm as a Buddha statue. He raises the angle of his gaze and looks at us both. Two sets of eyes now stare down at him. Page and I talk with soft voices. The tuft-eared cat finally exhibits a sign of uneasiness; he turns his head slowly and casually checks his backtrack like it was something he was planning to do all along.
After half a minute our big, black, Chesapeake Bay-Labrador retriever mix-all natural guard dog, rough and ready-barges out onto the deck and looks where we are looking. Otter whines, barks three times before I hush him and grab his collar to prevent him from mounting a charge of the macho-dog brigade.
Now six eyes atop eight legs stare down at him. The eighty-five pound newcomer, plainly larger and more powerful than the local coyotes, tips the balance. Bob's posture stiffens, but he doesn't move, not right away. The cool cat waits a dignified twelve to fifteen seconds after Otter's final bark before he slowly, ever so nonchalantly, turns around and walks away with the calculated insouciance that only a tree-climbing cat can affect. We spot the black-and-white color pattern on the back of his ears-black, white, black again top to bottom-for a few seconds. The feline melted into the mountain laurel and was gone, like the green understory had inhaled a blown breath of light brown mist.
February 9, 2014, Everglades National Park. If you paddlecraft camp in the interior of the Everglades (all designated backcountry sites that are not beaches or keys out in the gulf), you will want to obtain your permit the day prior to your launch date, and you will want to arrive at the ranger station early to have the best shot at securing your site selections. The difference between camping on a chickee, a stilted and roofed shelter out in the water and open to the wind, and an interior ground site tucked into a breezeless miasma of red mangrove can be the difference between discomfort and mosquito-harried misery, especially from early dusk to dark. I have heard more than one man walk up third in line and begin to curse because he knows his first night out in the interior from Everglades City will be Lopez River, a particularly mosquito-bedeviled ground site.
Page dropped me off at the ranger station at six, straight up, a full two hours before it opened for permit business at eight. I sat down on the bench first in line and all alone in the pre-dawn dark and began to read by headlight. A while later Page came back with breakfast. We waited and hoped we would get our first five picks until we paddled out into the gulf.
About ten minutes after daylight, while we were still alone, we heard a single, slow-flying crow raucously cawing at something nearby. Page and I knew the sound; it was the sound the first crow to find a daylight owl utters, the one that calls in the mob squad. The lone corvid is probably chasing an avian predator away from the grassy opening in front of the ranger station. Had we the time, both of us would have bet our chance at reserving Sweetwater Chickee the mob-ee was a fellow bird, the usual generalist-raptor-Red-tailed or Red-shouldered Hawk, Great Horned or Barred Owl. We slowly turned around to look, then jumped up in shocked surprise.
The crow was closely trailing a lean and long-legged bobcat from right to left across the wide width of the lawn. The lithe wildcat was not sprinting, but he was clearly uncomfortable being out in the open during daylight and having that loud-mouth, neighborhood-watch crow announce his whereabouts to everyone in the county.
We observed the American Crow run off the obligate carnivore for perhaps four or five seconds before they both disappeared behind the bathrooms. I hustled around the corner, but the crow had broken off the escort, and the cat was gone, either weaving its way between parked cars or back in the sub-tropical bush.
We had just watched a big male bobcat running right in front of us, in full-body profile, out in the open of a mowed lawn. The feline loped with supple ease and effortless grace. By the end of our eleven-day trip, we knew that our strangest and most surprising sighting-a single cawing crow shooing a bobcat to quick pace-had occurred the morning before we canoed into the first bay. The behavior we witnessed, which made perfect sense in hindsight, was so new and novel that we had never heard of or imagined its existence before.
Black Friday, 2017, Black Moshannon State Park, Pennsylvania. I was visiting my elderly parents in State College, the Happy Valley home of the Nittany Lions. On the day after Thanksgiving, I drove to the state park in Centre County northwest of State College with a large subset of the people I had dined with the day before. We parked next to the dam plugging up the 250-acre Black Moshannnon Lake and started hiking Shingle Mill Trail as it closely shadowed Black Moshannon Creek (locally known as the Black Mo) downstream to the north.
The six of us began walking on a blue, sun-bright afternoon, temperature maybe in the mid-fifties, the warmest day of my visit. The creek's name comes from the color of its flow, water dyed dark by tannins from the extensive bog surrounding the lake. On this late November day the stream had a lively current, its riffles and glide-water runs quick and cold between the occasional deeper and darker pools.
I couldn't help but notice I was walking through a very familiar flora, almost as if I had driven for parts of two days and had not left the Mountain South. The trailside vegetation-both riparian and lower slope, ground cover to canopy-bore an uncanny resemblance to some of North Carolina's Southern Appalachian forests: mountain holly, hemlock, northern red and chestnut oak, yellow and sweet (aka black) birch, red maple, etc. Rhododendron thickets frequently flank the Black Mo. Dense colonies of wintergreen often cover the forest floor. To me, a long-time resident of North Georgia, both the scene and the setting were incongruous, way out of place. Here was a South Georgia amber-colored creek flowing through a North Carolina mountain forest … smack in the middle of Pennsylvania.
At the two-mile mark the yellow-blazed path crosses a road that leads to a bridge over the creek to the right. The rest of the group decided to road-walk back to the trailhead, turning their route into a loop. I wanted to walk fast and wanted to see the upstream riffles of the blackwater creek flash sparkling silver in the afternoon's low-slanting sunlight.
A little more than halfway back, I walked around a slight bend in the rhododendron-edged treadway and slammed on the brakes. A smallish predator was standing and stationary in the middle of the track 45 to 50 feet away. Its pale amber-yellow eyes and tufted ears were focused on me. My eyes held its gaze for a good, long-enough look of two seconds before the bobcat spun around and ran back up the trail with quick and flowing strides, fast but well short of an all-out sprint. The wildcat retreated for about 35 to 40 yards, then broke my sightline as it leapt into the rhododendron to the right of the route.
I left the trail and walked uphill to my right away from the stream. I quickly climbed above the narrow belt of evergreen heath shrubs and gained long sightlines through the open hardwood forest. I sat down on a rock and scanned the rising slope, hoping the wildcat might work its way out onto the rock-bedded and leaf-thatched sidehill. No movement. No luck. The terrain was probably far too open for a recently spooked cat.
My five or six-second sighting was long enough to notice two distinctive differences: the size of the cat and the color of its coat. This bobcat was smaller-shorter body, shorter legs-than all of the other wildcats I had seen from a fairly close distance. I concluded this relatively little Lynx rufus had to be a female, possibly a young of the year female.
All of the other bobcats I had laid eyes on were camouflaged with a mix of browns sprinkled with small spots and splotches of black and white. But this Pennsylvania wildcat's winter fur was predominantly gray, which I later learned is the usual color for a winter bobcat in colder climes.
This gray-furred female was the first of its species I had ever spotted on a trail. And at age sixty-six with forty-three years of wildland hiking under my boots, I knew exactly how lucky I had been. The riffling creek had been noisy enough to muffle my footfalls. The dense growths of rhododendron hedging that segment of trail had greatly reduced visibility around the slightest of bends. When there was any breeze at all, it was blowing toward the right side of my face. I was walking fast and alone and, as luck and happenstance would choreograph our meeting, a bobcat was padding down the same path in my direction.
Notes
* I believe the large tom bob that stared up at me from just across the creek was a cool cat looking for a kitty. South of the state's mountains, the peak bobcat breeding season in Georgia is February-March. That feline had been trailing her scent markings in the broad daylight before stopping beside the high-water stream. I wondered if the female he was following had crossed the creek at low-water level the day before.
The public land within the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and the private pine plantations surrounding the swamp were blackened by large-acreage forest fires in 1954 and 1955. To prevent fires from starting in the swamp and spreading to nearby commercial timber lands, the Suwannee River Sill was constructed along the western side of the refuge. Located due west of Steven C. Foster State Park, the approximately 4.5-mile-long sill was completed in 1960.
The sill did not accomplish its objective; it did not hold back enough water to be a reliable fire deterrent throughout most of the swamp. The sill was breached in 2010 to allow the Okefenokee's extensive hydrologic system to flow and function naturally again. The 3-mile run of the Suwannee from Billys Lake to the sill canal quickly returned to "the narrows" again, a well-defined but narrow river with a fluctuating current and depth again.
Like many other mammalian predators, bobcats exhibit a substantial sexual dimorphism in size. Males are significantly longer, taller, and heavier, on average, than females. Seth Riley, who studied bobcats for the National Park Service north of San Francisco, had this to say about the different sizes of the bobcat sexes. "It's almost as if male bobcats are a different species than females. Their weights and foraging habits are so different. Males are more muscular and their heads are larger. In my study area (Golden Gate National Recreation Area) males weigh 20 to 22 pounds, while females weigh 11 to 13 pounds."
Researchers examined the winter diets of bobcats in Maine and found that the white-tailed deer was the most important prey species for both adult and yearling males. Deep snow made it easier for male bobcats to stalk and kill deer. Female and juvenile wildcats specialized in taking smaller prey, rodents and snowshoe hare. During winter in Maine, their size differences allowed male and female bobcats to occupy different niches. No matter what the selectors are for increased male size, the end result allows the sexes to partition food resources and greatly reduce competition during the most energy-stressful time of the year. The end result is an ingenious adaptation that engenders survival.
Much of the information concerning the bobcat's significant sexual dimorphism in size came from the book, BOBCAT Master of Survival, written by Kevin Hansen.
Back home, I googled Black Moshannon State Park and learned the preserve was surprisingly large: approximately 3,394 acres. Over 43,000 acres of the Moshannon State Forest surround most of the park, adding much more room to roam for hikers and bobcats. According to local tradition, American Indians called the watershed, with its extensive wetlands, "Moss-Hanne," meaning "moose stream." The moose are long gone, but some of their former habitat is protected in the approximately 1,592-acre Black Moshannon Bog Natural Area within the park.
A short piece entitled Wildlife Watching said, "Sharp-eyed visitors may encounter frogs, salamanders, northern watersnakes, or black bears. … Occasionally, visitors come upon fox, weasels, bobcats, coyotes, and ravens." One short sentence stood out. "Relish luck and the unexpected."
