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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Bobcat “Sit-down”
If you live where there is an abundance of rabbits or hares, you may have a population of Bobcats as well. These felines are elusive and shy — setting eyes on a Bobcat is a notable event. One must, for the most part, settle for signs of their presence and the chances of this are much greater in winter.
Bobcat signs include tracks, scrapes/scat, beds, kill sites (https://naturallycuriouswithmaryholland.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/bobcats-preying-on-rabbits-hares/) and cache sites (see https://naturallycuriouswithmaryholland.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/a-bobcats-white-tailed-deer-cache/) . Tracks are by far the most common sign. Occasionally you come across a protected spot where a hunting cat has sat and surveyed the area for prey (see photo). Because time was spent in the same position the details of its tracks can be well defined in the right snow conditions: four toe impressions (one slightly leading) with a large heel pad that often shows two lobes at the top and three on the bottom, and no claw marks.
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Bobcats Preying On Rabbits & Hares
Bobcats are capable of preying on animals as large as White-tailed Deer (which they rarely do), but far more frequently they choose the easier-to-catch rabbit or hare. Typically at dawn or dusk a Bobcat will head out to locate and stalk its prey, slowly getting close enough to pounce on it. Although they sometimes eat their prey immediately, Bobcats often carry it to a concealed area under brush where they eat it. (see photo). In this scene, in addition to leaving some of the hair of the Eastern Cottontail Rabbit it consumed, the Bobcat defecated, leaving its blunt-ended, segmented scat as further evidence of its presence (lower right in photo). (Thanks to Jody Crosby for photo op.)
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