The Last Bobcat

The last bobcat, ready to be sent to his new temporary home.

 

The half-grown bobcat hissed and snarled as Tom Sanders of Wet Mountain Wildlife grabbed him with a noose pole and lowered him into the carrier that I held open. Unlike the other bobcats we had released last July, he was bound for another facility. Wet Mountain is winding down, and today's wildife transport might have been the last I will do there, unless something major changes.

Back on Friday, October 3, M. and I were riding Amtrak's Floridian through the forested valley of the Youghiogheny River in western Pennsylvania, the most scenic stretch of railroad between Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. My volunteer fire department iPhone app started its high-low beeping. Someone was needed at the fire house to help the ambulance crew load a patient into a Flight for Life helicopter at our helipad.

I marked myself as Unavailable. Then I looked at the incident address, where a 78-year-old woman had suffered "a fall." Oh shit. Oh no.

Cec (short for Cecilia) and Tom Sanders began working as wildlife rehabilitators at their home in Pueblo, where they both taught in D-60 schools. In the 1980s they bought a house on a small acreage farther west, still in commuting distance, later adding more land that they put under a conservation easement. Every year they cared for multiple orphaned deer (mule deer, whitetails, and also pronghorn antelope and even elk)  and their land corridor made it possible to "soft release" them into the hills — they eventually just wandered out from the the fawn enclosure.

Sitting by a tranquilized bear, Cec Sanders chats with district wildlife managers
Kim Woodruff and Justin Krall, who will be releasing it into the mountains. (June 2018)

Other enclosures and structures held many bear cubs, plus beavers, mountain lions, bobcats, porcupines,  raccoons, and one time a Sulcata tortoise, which eventually went to the Denver Zoo. They also for years housed cockatoos and other tropical birds seized from illegal traders, birds that could not legally be sold. (Those went to a bird sanctuary a couple of years ago.) And I am probably forgetting other species.

That day, Oct. 3, Cec awoke feeling dizzy and "off." Tom was preparing to drive her to a hospital when she collapsed, so he called for an ambulance. Seeing that she had suffered a major stroke, the paramedics summoned a helicopter, but it was all too late. She never regained full consciousness and died two days later. 

While Tom worked in the background, hauling, building, fixing, photographing, Cec was the chief animal-attendant, publicist, and fundraiser. Her book about their first years, If You Talk to Animals: The Life of a Wildlife Rehabilitator, is available on Amazon.

Without her, there is no facility, and no one is waiting in the wings. And what happens to the orphan bear cub in southeast Colorado? A much longer drive— or else a bullet.

Luckily, there were no young bears over-wintering. The district wildlife manager (game warden) took a porcupine and a raccoon to some state land in the Wet Mountains. That left the bobcat — the fawns would hang out with other deer and fend for themselves. Another rehabber up in Douglas County had two cubs and agreed to take this one too. Then they could all be hateful together, which is good preparation for adult life as a bobcat. 

I slid the carrier into my Jeep, covered it with a sheet to reduce outside stimuli, and started home to pick up M. for the trip. It's a good thing that I know that road well, because I was not paying much attention to it.