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 even elk). Fawns eventually wandered from their enclosure into the hills.

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 bear cubs, plus beavers, mountain lions, bobcats, porcupines,  raccoons, and one time a Sulcata tortoise, which eventually went to the Denver Zoo Cec and Tom 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.

Setting Some Bobcats Loose in a Canyon Near Home

The bobcats in June, hostile and ready to go wild.

I not only got to release some bobcats recently, but I got to pick the place, which felt good. 

There was a certain canyon more or less torched by a forest fire nine years ago. Lots of the conifers are gone, except down along the creek where the fire skipped them, but the Gambel oak has sprouted copiously.

Steep slopes, thick brush, lots of rock outcroppings -- and I had been seeing more rock squirrels, etc. It all seemed like good country for an adaptable mesopredator. 

The local wildlife rehabilitators had raised six orphaned kittens over the winter. Now they were full size and full of hatred for civilization and all its works. As they should be.

A couple were "soft-released" — just open the enclosure at the foothills location and let them go.  Two went elsewhere on the national forest. The local district wildife manager (game warden) met my suggestion for the last two with a "Yeah sure, sounds good."

 

M. and I went to the site along with one of the rehabbers—he was mainly interested in getting photos and a chance for some sightseeing.

I set the two live trips down near the stream. I figured that if the first thing the encountered was the water, they would know where to get a drink-- and maybe the creekside area provide good hunting.

Didn't really need the heavy gauntlets, but I was taking no chances.

 

And there goes bobcat number one. A moment after the shutter snapped, it took off running. As it should.

 

The second one followed half a minute later, and our work was done. 

 

These bobcats are not collared or anything. No one knows where they are but themselves. I just hope that the prey base is there and that they are doing all right.

 

As a wildlife-transport volunteer, I am usually bringing birds and animals to one rehabilitation center or another. But setting them loose (when they survive) is even better. 

Did Wolf Reintroduction Doom Colorado's Big Cat-Hunting Ban?

Someone in my area left their anti-Prop. 127 sign up well past Election Day.

First, let me say that I am still in the blogging game. There were deadlines, then there was business travel, not to mention travel to aid a sick friend, and then the business travel gave me some kind of case of the nasties that I am still sleeping off now. 

November was sort of a total loss, but on the electoral side there was one stunning surprise. Not Donald Trump — I mean the defeat of Colorado Proposition 127, which set out to ban the hunting of bobcats and mountain lions — and lynx, but there is no season on them anyway.

The proposition's text began, "The voters of Colorado find and declare that any trophy hunting of mountain lions, bobcats, or lynx is inhumane, serves no socially acceptable or ecologically beneficial purpose, and fails to further public safety." (Cats Aren't Trophies website.)

Of course, it was written so that "trophy hunting" meant "any hunting," just in case anyone claimed to be a subsistence mountain-lion hunter. Some people do eat them and find the meat tasty, but I have no personal experience there. One neighbor is a houndsman, and I have been outdoors working to be suddenly swarmed by four or five dogs with GPS collars, who give a quick hello and then tear off into the forest. (They don't know where the public land boundary is, being dogs.) I know that group has occasional success, but they've never offered me any lion chops.

Anti-127 signs were all over my county and the next one, but I figured it was a lost cause. The big urban counties would go "Aw, kitties!" and vote Yes. 

The momentum was there. Several ballot measures restricting types of hunting have passed in the last thirty years:

• 1992: A 70–30 percent vote ended the spring bear season, which usually meant hunting over bait. (I had worked briefly for an outfitter in the 1980s, making me the guy pouring Karo syrup over a pile of day-old doughnuts in front of a tree stand). Some hunters supported that one. It also outlawed hunting bears with dogs at any time, although that was never a big thing.
• 1996 A state constitutional amendment, not merely a regulatory change, prohibited "the use of leghold traps, instant-kill body-gripping design traps, poisons, or snares; providing an exception for the use of such methods by certain governmental entities for the purpose of protecting human health or safety or managing fish or other nonmammalian wildlife; providing an exception for the use of such methods to control birds or to control rodents other than beaver and muskrat, as otherwise authorized by law." It passed 52–47 percent.
  
• 2020 While not directly about hunting, Prop. 114, demanding reintroduction of gray wolves, squeaked through 51–49 percent, with urban counties leading the charge.  

So when Prop. 127 went down with 56 percent "no" votes, I was astonished. Colorado Public Radio offered an answer: Blame the wolves. 

Dan Gates, who led the opposition campaign against Proposition 127, had predicted in the run-up to the vote that the controversial wolf reintroduction effort would convince voters to reject the hunting measure — and said the results bear that out. 

He thinks watching Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists struggle with livestock attacks from wolves soured voters on removing their full control of other predators.

After all the "wolves won't attack cattle" — wolves attack cattle — "Those are BAD wolves; we will re-trap them and replace them with GOOD wolves," who wouldn't be a little cynical. Even Cats Aren't Trophies is negative:

The team behind Proposition 127 agrees that wolf reintroduction worked against the proposed ban on big cat hunting. Samantha Miller, campaign manager for Cats Aren’t Trophies, said the management of wolf reintroduction has been a “tragedy,” and said she would have voted against that measure if she had been a Colorado resident at the time. 

Miller, who now lives in Grand County, said wolf reintroduction and the resulting backlash “has really caused a lot of distrust and a lot of really negative stories around carnivores that has bled out into this campaign.”

Surely it's no coincidence that two weeks after the election, CPW released a report on Western Slope mountain lion density.   Biologists used GPS tracking and scout cameras in several areas:

Results of the camera-based mark-resight estimates in Middle Park averaged 2.5 independent lions per 39 square miles during the winters of 2021-22 and 2022-23.

In the Gunnison Basin, CPW observed an average density of 4.2 independent lions per 39 square miles in the winters of 2022-23 and 2023-24.

[Mark Vieira, CPW’s Carnivore and Furbearer Program Manager] said, "This combination of GPS collars and ear tags on lions paired with trail cameras across large representative study areas is showing us that parts of Colorado appear to have high lion numbers compared to studies of lions in other states.”

Every time that I think I should do a big round-up post on the wolves, some new development pops up, and I don't get it done. One of these days! But meanwhile, this wolf-mountain lion interaction was a surprise at the ballot box.

Bobcats Released in SE Colorado

Our friends at Wet Mountain Wildlife received these bobcat cubs last year, and in May they were released near where they (or at least one) were found, at the Army's Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS) northeast of Trinidad.

PCMS was created in the late 1970s (officially opened in 1983) when the Army wanted more area for mechanized-warfare training than was available at Fort Carson, Colorado Springs.

Fort Carson itself was created by expropriating some ranches south of town during World War II. The "city fathers" of Colorado Springs wanted to bring military spending to their quiet town of 35,000 or so population -- and they got it.

The founding of PCMS was a more bitter process. Various areas were considered, including South Park. In the end, several large ranches near the Purgatory River were taken by eminent domain despite some landowners' efforts to fight the takings in court. Others just took the money.

The Army has sponsored some goodwill tours for politicians, journalists, etc. but I have visited PCMS as a hunter. There are some hoops to be jumped through, but it is possible to hunt there (and on Fort Carson itself).

With an older friend (a rancher/retired schoolteacher) I made several trips to PCMS in the 1990s, before his passing. We signed up to hunt quail, but mainly we were visiting some of the archaeological sites, the ruined stage station from the Barlow and Sanderson line, and more recent ruins like the 1920s–1930s Colorado Interstate Gas pipeline-construction camp, which has played new roles during Army training.

On one trip we drove up to an empty ranch house. A lot of equipment had been left there in a barn. 

The back door of the house was unlocked, so we walked in. There was furniture in place, kids' toys on the floor, and a 1975 Sears, Roebuck catalog lying on the kitchen counter, all covered with a light layer of dust and sadness.  Was this the home of a family who fought to stay or one who took the money and walked away? 

We could only turn and go back out the door, kind of creeped out, feeling like intruders.

Biggish Cats, Short Tails

 

In early January 2024 Mario Angeles video'd these two lynx near Silverton, Colorado. That is a special moment, all right. Between native populations and (mainly) reintroduction, Colorao's lynx population is estimated at only 150 and 250 animals. 

And while it's not a lynx — not down here in the foothills where there is little snow on the ground — the scout camera right up behind the house did pick up a bobcat this month.

This is good bobcat habitat though, rocky and brushy, but you do not see them very often. 

Just for comparison, here is a young bobcat living large at the wildlife rehabilitation center in Custer County, due to be released when the weather warms. 

Photo: Wet Mountain Wildlife

I Am not a Pixie-bob! I Am a Wild Cat!

A yummy rat makes travel time go by more quickly.  Our neighbor
wildlife rehabbers like to put stuffed toys with small mammals for companionship.

Some where in southeastern Colorado, someone "found" a bobcat kitten in an abandoned house out on the prairie. (In other words, the kitten was probably part of a litter, with a mother, but was snatched.)

The "finder" took her back to town, where she was kept as a pet and described to everyone as a "pixie-bob."

I never heard of a "pixie-bob" before this week. Apparently it's a bobtailed domestic cat breed that (allegedly) has some bobcat genetics, but don't waste your money on a DNA test.

Someone tipped off a Colorado Parks and Wildlife district wildlife manager. Keeping wild mammals as pets is totally illegal, unless you're a rehabilitator or a licensed zoo, etc. Since her mother's location was unknown, a wildlife rehabilitation center was the only place for her.

M. and I, the volunteer wildlife transporters, met him partway between here and there and picked her up in a busy big-box store parking lot. Is there anything more dissonant than handling a wild animal amid acres of asphalt, rumbing motors, truck traffic on the interstate highway, the smell of fast-food restaurant grease, and a hot summer wind?

Back in the foothills of home, we left her with the rehabbers for a short stay. They had raised three bobcat kittens over this past winter — those three were released earlier this summer.

But one kitten is a lonely kitten. A rehabber in Douglas County already had two kittens and was happy to take a third.

By now we were calling this one "Pixie-bob," and she had been happily eating elk and chicken bits in a Tuff Shed-turned nursery, but it was time for her (wriggling wildly) to go back into the blue carrier and travel more than an hour northward. She got a freshly thawed rat to occupy her on the trip; when I cleaned the carrier afterwards, nothing was left but a short section of the tail. Crunch crunch!

With any luck, this will be her next May or June:

Bobcat release (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

Bobcats Released, Bunnies Beware

Bobcats. Photo by Tom Sanders, Wet Mountain Wildlife.

Two  bobcat kittens (Felis rufus) came into the local rehabilitation shelter a year ago. Actually, at one point there were three, but one released himself, hung around for a time for the free meals, and then went on his way. These two stayed put and ate rats. Lots of rats, delivered by the Rat Man, who was usually me.

I picked up so many rats at the Raptor Center that I felt I needed a steampunk Rat Man costume and a Cockney accent: "Foine rats, madam. None better!"

I always thought the Raptor Center raised their own rats and mice, but they buy them too. They come neatly arranged on a plastic-wrapped foam tray, just like when you buy rats at the supermarket. 

Rats may be ordered by size, up from "pinkies" to "jumbo," or whatever the New York-size ones are called.

But enough about rats. The bobcats are them, grew up, and on the summer solstice they were released on the High Plains near Limon, Colorado. If you were thinking of them as a forest cat, think again — they were found near Limon, and they can make a living on rabbits, rodents, and maybe by scavenging birds knocked out the sky by the renewable electricity project in the background of the video (courtesy of Colorado Parks & Wildlife).

An Injured Bobcat and the Seduction of the "The Mission"

Will s/he make it through the night?

The call came as M. and were finishing supper and planning to watch an episode of Orange is the New Black. A game warden wanted to meet us in the next county to the north with an injured bobcat, which we would take to the rehabilitation center.

There was the usual back and forth over where to rendezvous; then I grabbed a bobcat-sized carrier (medium) and my welder's gloves, and we were off.

Pretty soon we're at the rendezvous point, and here comes this shiny black Colorado Parks & Wildlife truck. And in the back in another carrier is a very displeased bobcat who did not want to move from its carrier into mine, so I had to reach in and grab him.

Touch not the cat bot a glove, as the Scots said. There is some truth to that. It was kind of a "Here, hold my beer" moment, only I had no beer.

I stuffed the unhappy cat into my carrier, and we set off. At the center, we put the carrier in one of the enclosures. The bobcat will get food and water, and in the morning — if it's still alive — its caretakers will decide what to do next.

The backstory was kind of sketchy — someone in the Colorado Springs area had found it apparently dead (hit by a car?) and put it in a pillowcase in order to deposit it in a trash can (!!), when it came to life. Or something like that. Internal injuries?

As we drove to meet the game warden, I was thinking how I am someone who lives in his head a lot, usually having internal dialogs about how this project is behind and how I need to get going on that article and when am I going to fix XYZ around the house and on and on.

And then, whether it is the volunteer fire department or the wildlife transport gig, the radio squawks or the telephone rings and  . . . that's it. Get the appropriate gear and go.

The change is almost relaxing. It's like an altered state. There is only The Mission, and everything else is shoved into the background. I think we humans like that state of being.

A fire call came in last winter for a structure fire at the far edge of our service area, about a 45-minute drive from the firehouse.

One engine had taken off ahead of me, and I was driving a second one, alone— a violation of the procedure that normally required a minimum of two firefighters per engine, except that another guy was coming in his own vehicle to meet me on-scene.

It was just before dawn, and I was going up this lonely winding canyon road with the red and blue lights bouncing off the rocks and cliffs beside the road, like my own private rave.

Dream-like. . . . I could have gone on and on and on.

UPDATE, JULY 25, 2018:  The bobcat was released today in the foothills near the rehabiliation center. The rehabbers said that it took off like a rocket when they opened the door of its carrier.