This time of year, if you are very lucky, you might see a shadow dart through the woods, or drift by a road at dusk, or float through a field, pausing at the edge of a swamp.
Spare a thought for the solitary bobcat, a creature that has been mythologized by humans pretty much since the day our species began to tell stories.
My first encounter came through a series of tracks in the snow off of Route 82 in Pine Plains, which revealed the unmistakable linear pattern of a wildcat. The claw marks, their claws being retractable, were invisible. The next day, the tracks took a different direction. The bobcat seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.
It would be several years before I finally saw the elusive cat. The big moment came not on a remote mountaintop or in a moonlit swamp, but along Route 41 in Sharon, Conn., midway between the Sharon Market and AB Landscaping.
The wildcat paused at the roadside, fixed me with a hypnotic stare, and vanished. I rubbed my eyes to make sure I was not hallucinating.
The American bobcat and its close relative, the lynx, feature in the legends and folklore of countries around the world. Indigenous Americans and ancient Europeans admired these enigmatic creatures for their ferocity and grace, and for their ability to appear and vanish at will. (The lynx is no longer found in New York state).
The ancient Greeks had many myths around wildcats, some believed their piercing eyes could see through mountains.
It’s easy to understand why bobcats are the stuff of legend. They’re thought to have evolved from the Eurasian lynx, which, like humans later, crossed into North America by way of the Bering Land Bridge during the Pleistocene Epoch and its ice ages, arriving here some 2.6 million years ago.
More than twice the size of a large house cat, bobcats have large paws, up to 2 1/2 inches long. Males can be 3 feet long and weigh 30 pounds, with a distinctive bobbed tail. Females are a few inches shorter. Both are distinguished by beautiful ear tufts, which scientists say aid them in hearing. The spots and bars on their chest and legs provide useful camouflage when stalking prey.
They are fearsome hunters. Bobcats can leap 15 feet in a single bound and take down animals eight times their bodyweight, including deer. Unlike housecats, wildcats are also skillful swimmers. Locally, their diet consists primarily of rabbits and other small mammals, and birds. They seem particularly fond of blue jays.
They are solitary animals except during mating season (late winter to early spring), when males and females can be seen together.
Want to glimpse a bobcat? Naturalists say your best chance is when they’re hunting, either around twilight or shortly before and after dawn.
You wouldn’t know it because they are so secretive, but the bobcat is North America’s most common native wildcat. Their population is less than a million, not a lot considering their range covers roughly 3 billion acres from Mexico to southern Canada.
Locally, bobcats appear to be fond of the many ponds and marshes in the Stanfordville, Pine Plains, and Ancramdale areas, including along Route 82 between Stanfordville and Pine Plains.
If you see one, you’ll probably ask yourself: How can these animals be both so elusive and so unafraid of us?
I asked Mandy Waston, the biologist with a speciality in fur-bearing animals at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “Bobcats are very charismatic and very secretive,” she told me. “We still don’t know much about them.”
How many bobcats are out there across New York state? “Their elusiveness makes them pretty hard to count,” Watson said. “Our best estimate is about 5,000.”
“Their populations are relatively stable. They have even recolonized Western New York, from where they were extirpated decades ago. That’s a conservation success.”
Bobcats’ secretiveness allows them to regularly penetrate human habitats unobserved. “You never really know when they are around,” said Watson. “It’s not like a black bear which, when it’s in your backyard, you know about it.”
In a bid to learn more about wildcats, the DEC licensed 11 trappers last year to do live captures. The animals were checked and equipped with GPS collars. The data have already yielded startling revelations. “We found they had been dispersing and finding new territory at a far greater pace than we expected,” Watson said. “One animal even travelled more than 30 miles in a single day in the Catskills.”
Watson told me this proved that “wildlife like bobcats are way more adaptable than we give them credit for.”
In other ways, though, bobcats are not at all surprising. “We’ve also found that they can act just like a big house cat,” Watson said. “They are very attracted to a sparkly ribbon hanging from a tree. They start playing with it.”
The bobcats’ stable population levels led New York to institute a managed trapping season in 2012, one of 41 states to do so. The 2024–25 season ran from Oct. 24 to Feb. 15. Licensed trappers catch an average of 400 bobcats every year in New York, including on state land in the Pine Plains area.
Before receiving a license, trappers undergo rigorous training focusing on regulations and the ethics of trapping, Watson said. “They are required to check their traps every day. And they can’t use traps with teeth.”
Bart Tenore, a lifelong Pine Plains resident and hunter, has been on the lookout for bobcats his entire life but has seen one only twice, once when he was driving a school bus up Woodward Hill Road, a day he remembers clearly. When I asked him why he thinks that cats seem unafraid of people, he told me, “They’re pretty near the top of the food chain. They don’t have a lot of fear.”
The fact that these wildcats are so widespread yet so elusive is a lesson in itself. They seem to be reminding us that even in residential areas, where cameras are everywhere, there is still room for mystery and awe. The “woods ghost” still moves us, just as it moved those who came before us.
Had a bobcat encounter locally? Please share it with us at editor@newpineplainsherald.org, and help solve the mysteries of the bobcat by contacting New York state DEC.