Their diet can consist of rabbits, rats, squirrels , certain types of birds, and even deer particularly in the winter. Bobcats have also been known to eat chickens or lamb if they live near farms. Bobcats have a great sense of sight and hearing and they are great hunters. They are very good at sneaking around through brush and bushes without making much noise, which gives them an advantage over their prey. Although bobcats can run up to 30 miles per hour and are usually depicted as very fast animals, they prefer to walk.
This den can be a typical cave or rock shelter, hollowed out log, or any type of place that provides protection for them. Bobcats have a litter size of about kittens. The kittens are born blind and cannot open their eyes until around 10 days have passed. Baby bobcats will begin eating solid food at around 2 months.
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In the early morning, the felines return to their slumber and the whole cycle repeats itself. According to one study , they do adjust their schedules based on the lunar cycle. Bobcats are at their most active during the twilight hours, when potential targets like eastern cottontail rabbits tend to forage. In the wintertime, though, food gets scarcer, which prompts some of the cats to change their schedules: Throughout the colder months, bobcats in northern states will often adjust their sleep regimen so that they can spend more time tracking down prey in broad daylight.
Fully grown bobcats can weigh up to 33 pounds. For the most part, they eat rabbits, birds , rodents, and other fairly small creatures. However, the cats are also extremely adept at killing adult white-tailed deer.
Although they generally hunt fawns, they have been known to kill adults, which can weigh pounds or more. To slay such a large herbivore, a bobcat will jump onto its back and bite through the throat. Decades of overhunting and deforestation meant that bobcats had been more or less eradicated from New Jersey by the early s. In response, the state's Division of Fish and Wildlife began to import newly-captured specimens from Maine.
It would appear that this effort paid off: Since , the local bobcat population has steadily grown, although the animals are mainly restricted to a few counties in north Jersey and the famous pinelands.
Bobcats—solitary hunters by nature—lay claim to an area of land that can be anywhere from 1 to 18 square miles in size they tend to be smaller in summer and larger in winter.
An individual bobcat will usually mark its territory by scratching up or excreting upon some strategically located trees. Of the two sexes, females behave more aggressively toward intruders—especially other females. When threatened by a bigger carnivore, these cats will usually head for the safety of the nearest tree. Climbing among the branches also affords bobcats the opportunity to dine on nesting birds every so often.
The felines have also been known to pounce onto unwary deer from overhanging tree limbs. Able to clear 12 feet in a single bound, the cats can easily jump across narrow waterways. One of them went viral in after it was filmed leaping across a yawning gap in a Louisiana dock that had partially collapsed.
According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife , bobcats can jump fences over 6 feet tall. Bobcats can't always consume their prey in one sitting. Sometimes, the carnivores use dirt, snow, leaves, or grass to bury the uneaten pieces of especially large corpses, and will return periodically to dig up their leftovers. Unfortunately, burying a corpse won't guarantee that it won't be discovered or nibbled on by other carnivores. Ravens, coyotes, bears, and those aforementioned mountain lions won't hesitate to raid a bobcat's secret stash if the opportunity arises.
Over the past several years, she's been collecting data on bobcats—specifically, those that now reside in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Here, their population has been steadily rising , particularly in suburban neighborhoods. Far away from Texas, bobcats have also established themselves along the outskirts of Denver and Los Angeles.
Interestingly, it looks like this urban lifestyle is turning the cats into night owls. Research conducted in the Los Angeles area shows that local bobcats are more fully nocturnal than their rural counterparts. This makes the big city felines less likely to encounter humans. Furthermore, L. Back in the s, the remains of a very young bobcat—which were originally misclassified as a puppy—were discovered beneath a year-old grave in western Illinois.
The plot in question was part of a much larger burial site created by a village aligned with the Hopewell Culture , a widespread group of related peoples who generally lived in small, isolated farming villages. Traditionally, when someone in a Hopewell community died, the deceased was laid to rest in a burial mound. While dog burials are known, they were in the villages, not the mounds.
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