THE MOUNTAIN BOBCAT

“What was I missing? I needed to know this cat’s schedule. I needed to know what he was hunting and when he was hunting it, and how often he was coming through the area.”

On December 8th around 7 a.m. he set foot in front of my trail camera for the very first time. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was no ordinary bobcat.

The first half of the 2021 trapping season wasn’t overly kind to my trapping partner Adrien and I. By the end of November we had bagged a fisher, a coon, two bobcats and several fox. However, that bit of success came at a cost. I had a coyote stolen, we both had several sets vandalized, and a miscommunication with a landowner of a prime piece of property led to a temporary loss of trapping permission. We decided to take the week of Thanksgiving off as we knew the deer hunting pressure would be high and we could use the rest. Sadly, between his work picking up and morale being hit pretty hard, Adrien couldn’t join me for the second half of the season.

Rifle season came to an end and now not only was I trapping new ground, I was doing it alone. It was a piece of property that I had hunted for years, but only had a few coyote sets in the log landings closer to the road earlier that season. Fortunately, although there was still two weeks of muzzle loader season, the only people hunting the property this late in the game were my dad and my older brother. This fact, along with my plan to go up further than any deer hunter would go, gave me confidence that my sets would be safe from any thieves. The initial plan was a simple one: Go where others won’t go, look where others won’t look, and do what others won’t do. This is a quote from Ray Milligan in his book titled “On the Prowl for Bobcats”.

There were two small mountains that I decided to explore and set for bobcat. The first one was a 700 footer I had nicknamed “Buck Mountain” due to all the scrapes and rubs at the top. The lower 600 feet had recently had several crisscrossing tote roads cut. Beyond the tote roads the slope got steeper and was thick with young spruce growth, which led to an open hardwood patch at the very top. Buck Mountain had some textbook habitat for cats and was in between other major cat holding habitats.

The other was a 600 footer I had originally nicknamed “Bobcat Mountain”, however, the name quickly changed to “Porky Mountain”, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Porky Mountain was, and continues to be, a bobcat trapper’s dream. The south side was made up of rock ledges with massive rock fall piles beneath them, which led down to a gut that divided Porky Mountain and Buck Mountain. At the base of the east side, thick beech saplings led up to heavily canopied spruce growth. An old tote road going over the mountain east to west provided thick new growth of spruce, pine, and beech trees. The west side had a much more gradual slope. Here the tote road forked off in a couple different directions. Between these tote roads the pines grew so close together it was nearly impossible to walk through. To the west and north were a couple of beaver bogs, neither of which were more than a mile away. The peak of Porky Mountain was open and rocky, though surrounded by thick spruce growth, and was loaded with cat sign.

My first round of scouting revealed several porcupine dens in the rocks, as well as a few well beaten trails where my game cameras later witnessed porcupine movement on a nightly basis. Throughout the period of time I trapped here, eight porcupines plugged up my bobcat sets. It didn’t take long to change the name to Porky Mountain. The first two times it happened they were caught in the same set. I had built a small rock cubby at the base of an oak tree, about ten feet from the base of a twenty foot ledge. Bobcats LOVE rocks, and I knew that this was a real catty spot. However, after two porcupines back to back, I decided to pull the trap from the cubby. I would later discover on trail camera that a well spotted female bobcat strolled through the very next day. The cats were clearly running the same trails as the porcupines, and had I not pulled that trap I could have had a pretty kitty waiting for me on the next trap check. That’s when I decided I would rather clean the porcupines out than pull sets to avoid them.

On December 8th around 7 a.m. he set foot in front of my trail camera for the very first time. I had the camera pointed at a spruce cubby I had made at the very top of Porky Mountain, only a few feet from where I had seen several piles of cat scat. When he first appeared, he was far enough from the camera in the low-light early morning that all that could be seen was the outline of his head and ears, and the shine of his eyes before he slowly sauntered out of the frame. When he re-appeared he was much closer, hugging the right side of my cubby as he snuck in to see what was inside. He turned in to the cubby entrance, but stopped one step shy of where I needed his paw to land to make the connection with my Oneida Victor. He sniffed around for a minute, then looked up as if something off camera caught his attention. With a flick of his tail he backed out of my cubby and walked away. This was no ordinary bobcat. Referencing the size of surrounding objects, plus seeing the girth of his belly and the size of his head, I knew this was a big cat. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought he was a lynx when he first appeared on camera. I felt an ache in my gut knowing he was one step shy of going on my wall. I made up my mind that I had to catch this cat, and so began our mountaintop game of cat and mouse.

At this point I needed to assess two things: what I knew and what I was missing. I knew there were at least two cats visiting Porky Mountain, one of which was a trophy sized tom cat. I knew that this specific location, on the peak where there were several cat scat piles, was red iron hot on the scale of bobcat hot spots. The trail camera footage showed that I needed to set my traps further back from the cubby entrances. It also suggested that I needed more attention grabbing bait and visual aid at my bobcat sets.

What was I missing? I needed to know this cat’s schedule. I needed to know what he was hunting and when he was hunting it, and how often he was coming through the area. There were plenty of potential food sources in the area: deer, partridge, squirrels, rabbit, beaver, and porcupine called this piece of property home. Based on my knowledge of bobcat behavior, I suspected that Big Tom was moving between beaver bogs and den areas, using thick growth and rocky terrain as travel ways. The logged land on this property was thick with coyote activity, meaning that Big Tom was less likely to pass through there. Bobcats, especially big ones, aren’t afraid of coyotes, but would rather not deal with the competition and will often avoid areas of high coyote activity. I never cut a single cat track on those tote roads.

I continued on with daily trap checks, which consisted of a two hour, two and a half mile hike over two small mountains with a loaded pack basket and a .22 in hand. I altered sets as I went along, moving traps back from cubby entrances, adding visual attractors, and resetting porcupine-filled traps. Cat activity had become dormant by this point. The lack of fresh sign had me worried this cat was gone and not coming back for a while. Still I pressed on, dealing with porcupine after porcupine and fighting discouragement on my trap checks. The beauty of being in the woods away from other humans made all the challenges much more tolerable.

With snow came new frustrations. At first it was still a lack of cat tracks. I saw plenty of other wildlife movement. Fresh deer and coyote tracks were a daily occurrence. Fox tracks were common to see as well, and I even caught a beautiful red on camera checking out one of my cat cubbies. I even had an encounter with a black bear mother and cub.

When I did start seeing cat tracks it was equally as frustrating as not seeing them. On one occasion they crossed the dirt road directly where I parked, cut through the thick pines in between the mountains and the paved road, and headed straight for a nearby beaver bog. I kicked myself hard for that one. How could I not have thought to put sets in those pines! It was a textbook travel way and had I set traps there, I very well could have caught whatever cat had passed through there. A couple days later I made some sets in that patch, but no cat passed through there for the rest of the trapping season.

Another occurrence was borderline insulting. At this point I had a fairly well-beaten foot path between my sets through the snow. A set of large cat tracks, which I was pretty sure was from Big Tom, followed my foot path on Porky Mountain. When I spotted the first track it was heading toward the traps I had already checked, so I knew I didn’t get him. I must have griped the entire way down that mountain as I repeatedly followed these tracks down my path until, just before being within eyeshot of my set, they would cut off my path, and I would find them again on my path after, of course, I was once again out of eyeshot of my set. I missed him in five sets that day.

The most hair pulling of my close calls with Big Tom happened December 22nd. I had recently pulled my sets on Buck Mountain. I hadn’t seen sign of cat activity and with the season nearing its end, I thought it a good idea to focus my efforts where I was seeing activity. I wanted to stick to my usual route as much as possible, so I walked up the gut between Buck and Porky Mountain to start my check, working my way over Porky Mountain and back to the vehicle. As I crested the peak to check the cubby where this big cat, who at this point seemed more like a legend, first revealed himself to me, I came up on quite a crime scene. My trap sat there, fired off and motionless, with two front paws of a rabbit in its jaws. I checked inside the cubby to find that the rabbit I had used for bait was still there. Inspection of the scene began to unravel the tale of what had happened here. Near the trap containing the rabbit feet was part of the rabbit’s hide. Blood stained the snow in the catch circle area, and a big set of cat tracks lead away from my set, accompanied by small drops of blood.

This lit a fire under me, and without a second thought I began following the tracks. I didn’t intend to stop until they led me to a means of harvesting this cat. Fortunately, I found my answer in no more than twenty yards. The tracks led to a small spruce sapling that sort of resembled the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It was short and scraggly, but it had a long bow that hung about two feet over the ground, until sagging to the ground at the tip. The tracks went under the bow where a pile of leaves had been turned up. A look inside revealed that the rabbit that had the misfortune of finding his way into my trap and on a silver platter. I picked two points I liked best on opposing sides, set a trap at each point, and fenced the set in liberally.

That night I checked the trail camera footage, which confirmed what I already knew. The rabbit had bounded its way into my trap and six minutes later Big Tom came into the frame. What was interesting about watching this was that Big Tom didn’t rush to kill the rabbit. Once the cat realized his prey couldn’t go anywhere, he stopped to assess the situation. For several minutes he lied down and watched the rabbit, while occasionally turning his head to scan the area. Eventually Big Tom got up and walked around the cubby, before finally entering and killing the rabbit. Part of me was nervous that he would leave the area for a period of time soon, but I knew it was unlikely that he would leave his meal unattended overnight, and I was confident that he’d be wearing my Oneida Victor as a bracelet when I got to the top of the mountain. I got very little sleep that night.

In my chase for Big Tom I observed that he would show up in the morning anywhere between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m., so I typically waited until at least 10:30 a.m. to check my sets. That morning I waited until 11:30 a.m. before I began my hike. For whatever reason I decided to do the climb in the opposite direction as usual. As I checked my traps at the base I felt anxious and excited. I knew if any of my sets were going to have Big Tom waiting for me, it was going to be the “stash set”, and at this point I just had to get through checking my other sets before finding out if my efforts paid off. On this particular day that steep climb felt symbolic of the journey this chase had taken me on so far.

When I rounded the corner to lay eyes on my stash set, I smiled from ear to ear as I saw spots and heard the low rumble of an angry bobcat. Finally! All of this hard work finally landed me a nice cat! When I first saw the cat alive, I knew it was nice, but I didn’t think it was Big Tom. He held himself in a way that made him seem much smaller than he actually was, and it wasn’t until I laid hands on him that I knew it was the one. When I held him up by his back feet, about level with my chin, the front feet dangled down and nearly touched my toes, and I’m 5’10”. He ended up weighing in at 31 pounds, and I felt every ounce of that lugging him a mile out of the woods.

I am forever grateful to have had the opportunity to pursue Big Tom, as it taught and inspired me a great deal. Hard work, determination, and a stroke of luck led to Big Tom’s demise and my success. Some people say it’s better to be lucky than good, while others say skill and cunning will get you further than luck ever will. Personally, I prefer to have a little of both.