Some days, I’m preoccupied with the animals that live their lives all around us but are seldom seen or heard. Many people are not even aware of their presence. I’m thinking of the racoon, deer mouse, hispid cotton rat, bobcat, chimney swift, or the short-tailed shrew, a small voracious and venomous mammal that also lives in our area. These organisms owe their lack of publicity to being solitary, shy, quiet, nocturnal, or relatively small—or all of the above. Today I’m focused on cats, but not that group of large, powerful and potentially dangerous cats that roam the wild in many parts of our world.

There also is a genus of smaller cats out there: Genus Felis, holding some 30 species of smaller cats, and our mountain lion, which you also may know as cougar, puma, or, in Florida, as the jaguar. One or more of these smaller species is found in most parts of the world, save the Arctic and Antarctic. Cats such as the ocelot in Arizona and Texas to northern Argentina; serval, in Morocco, Algeria and most of Africa south of the Sahara; caracal, in most of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, and Aral Sea to northern India; or the fishing cat, in Pakistan to Indochina, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and Java. Zoos commonly display one or more of these smaller cats.

Three of these 30 species occur in Kansas: Felis domesticus, the common house cat; Felis concolor, the mountain lion, and Felis rufus, the bobcat, or wildcat—Go Cats! The domestic cat has been here about as long as have humans, and the mountain lion, a recolonizing species, is busy reclaiming large chunks of its original range, including Kansas. The Kansas Division of Wildlife, Parks, and Tourism has confirmed some 25-plus sightings of the mountain lion in Kansas during the past 15-20 years. I know friends at Meadowlark—whose judgment I trust implicitly, who definitely saw a cougar crossing the highway several years ago as they were motoring south toward Wichita. 

I‘ve not seen the cougar in the wild in Kansas, but have seen their tracks in a cornfield along the Vermillion River over in Pottawatomie County. I have a high school rancher friend, located some 6 miles south of Onaga, who once told me to come out so she can show me the huge claw marks “high up on the rump of one of her mares.” 

Once a few years ago, while returning from visiting my sister near Smithville, Mo., I stopped at the Cabela Outfitter Store in west Kansas City, Kan., to look for a new pair of hiking boots. For no good reason, I swung by the gun section on the way to the shoe display. But the corner of my eye spied a strange looking weapon, and I stopped to ask a salesman about it. He agreed that it was a strange item, but then he began to relate a strange encounter he had had a few days prior with a smallish woman from Doniphan County in northeast Kansas. Seems she, a farmer’s wife, was a new widow, and one of her ways of dealing with grief was to take walks in the woods on her land. The week prior she had been thus engaged and looked up at one point to find herself face-to-face with a mountain lion. She stood her ground, and after a few minutes the lion turned and faded into the underbrush.

By now the woman was furious. Thus, she ended up at Cabelas with the demand that the person to whom I was speaking sell her a 357-Magnum pistol. Now, if you are not familiar with pistols, just know that the 357 packs a powerful punch—and a recoil to match! Being aware of this, and mentally matching this pistol with the smallish elderly would-be buyer, the salesman tried very hard to interest her in something a bit less powerful. Nothin’ doin’! She was double mad, and she left the store with that 357, and muttering the vow that “those are my woods, and I’ll walk in them anytime I darn well choose.” Like I’ve said many times, just ask any farmer or rancher about mountain lions, and they’ll answer with their version of “they’re around.”

But the bobcat has the longest unbroken tenure in these parts, certainly beginning eons before Indians began to trek these hills and valleys. This animal is very shy and secretive, and it tends to be solitary. You may have heard it vocalize during its breeding season, a caterwauling sound much like the domestic cat, but with more volume. The bobcat will spit, growl, and hiss if threatened. They are mostly nocturnal, but will sometimes be out during the day. The bobcat’s body length is 20 to 39 inches, with a weight of 11 to 40 pounds. Males are slightly larger. If you see a large cat-like animal with long legs and a bobbed tail, it must be the bobcat.

Bobcat dens usually are among rocks or in caves on craggy hillsides, but sometimes in woodchuck burrows or brush piles. They sneak up on prey then pounce and strike. They eat mainly rabbits and rodents, also birds and other vertebrates, including deer, which bobcats attack when the deer are bedded down. The young are born in spring or summer, with litter size of one to six, but mid-range litter size is typical. Young disperse before the next litter is born. 

Very few people have ever seen a wild bobcat. Even with as much time as I’ve spent in the wild, my first sighting of a wild bobcat, in my early 70s, was of one moving with stealth through the underbrush of a ponderosa pine forest in the mountains just southeast of Taos, NM—at 10,000 feet altitude.

A couple of years ago, my Meadowlark Valley neighbors, Linda and Steve Hall, shared with me an observation they recently had had during breakfast by a back window that looked out at their birdfeeder. A bobcat came methodically out of the woods, across their backyard, and then walked around the birdfeeder before moving slowly back into the woods. Some months after that event, and early one morning, Steve and Linda watched a half-grown bobcat walk up the sidewalk toward my front door before turning and going around the corner of my cottage and out of sight. This small cat, secretive, quiet, and harmless to humans, is a magnificent fellow traveler on Spaceship Earth. They, also a blessing, also “are around!”