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One might think that identifying a mountain lion or bobcat would be relatively easy as we are all familiar with cats and there are not many other species that they can be mistaken for.
This, however, is not the case. I get more identification reports and queries about possible mountain lion and bobcat sightings than for any other animals.
Despite the considerable visual differences between mountain lions and bobcats, even experts can be uncertain as to which cat they have seen.
Both mountain lions and bobcats tend to be secretive. They are predators that rely on stealth. Bobcats (Felis rufus) are sometimes called the ghost of the forest.
Recently two friends e-mailed me saying that they had each seen an unidentified cat that appeared too large to be a bobcat. Generally, bobcats are considered to be about twice the size of the average house cat. Bobcats get larger the further north you go, which is not uncommon for many other species. The males are considerably larger than the females and prey on larger animals, occasionally including deer. The largest bobcat was recorded in Maine at an astounding 76 pounds.
Renowned animal tracker Susan Morse once described to me how a large bobcat kills a deer. The bobcat sneaks up on a sleeping or resting deer and then jumps on it, seizing its throat. The deer leaps up desperately to shake the bobcat off. If the deer is not successful within a hundred feet, it is mercifully dead.
One of the e-mails I received was from Dr. Jim Utter, associate professor at SUNY Purchase and chairman of Friends of the Great Swamp. Jim attached a somewhat distant photograph of a cat he encountered in the Great Swamp near the Pawling-Dover line. I was surprised when he later told me it was the first bobcat he had seen in the Great Swamp, where he does field work almost daily.
Jim's photograph (see drawing) showed a magnificent, powerful running feline. He said its coat was tawny like a deer's, a color found on mountain lions. A bobcat's coat is typically spotted and striped.
A bobcat's tail is from four to seven inches long and is tipped with black. A mountain lion has a very long sweeping tail. If the viewer sees the long tail, then it is not a bobcat but either a mountain lion or a large dog. When the sighting is brief or partial, it is easy to mistake a large tan-colored, long-tailed dog for a mountain lion.
In Jim's photograph the tail was obscure but it did not appear to be long (mountain lion) and was definitely black tipped (bobcat).
In the photograph the long powerfully muscled body said mountain lion to me. It was possible that the tail, if long, was obscured.
Mostly because of the short, black tipped tail Jim concluded it was a bobcat, despite its large size and tan coat. When he later e-mailed the photograph to a state mammalogist, his identification was confirmed. Jim was told that bobcats sometimes have coats without the telltale spots and stripes.
When one sees a large cat in Dutchess and Putnam counties, it is most likely a bobcat. Once common throughout America, the mountain lion was extirpated from the East a hundred years ago. Today there is no breeding population of mountain lions in New York state. DNA tests have confirmed that the occasional valid mountain lion sighting is of a South American mountain lion that has been kept as an illegal pet and released here when it matured.
It has occurred to me that some of the unusual cats that are seen could be other species of illegally imported wild cats. I appreciate and enjoy getting your e-mails of puzzling animal sightings at Pawling5@Verizon.net.
