Bobcat Caches & Revisits White-tailed Deer Carcass

Rabbits and hares comprise much of a Bobcat’s diet, but when prey is scarce or hard to capture, adult male and large adult female Bobcats will attack bedded, weak or injured White-tailed Deer. Bobcats often cache prey such as a deer that is too large to eat in one feeding. They scrape up leaves, bark, twigs, soil, snow — whatever is available — and cover their prey, returning soon to eat it. When feeding on a deer, Bobcats bite away the hair to avoid eating it, and this discarded hair is frequently mixed with the debris that the cat drags over the kill to cover it.  

This photograph was taken 24 hours after the deer was cached, and the site has been visited by several predators. A characteristic sign of Bobcat feeding is the amount of hair strewn around the carcass and the lack of broken long bones (see inset). (Bobcats don’t have the strength to break large bones with their teeth.)

(Cache discovered by Lynn & Otto Wurzburg, who observed the Bobcat leaving after caching the deer)

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