Bad Day to be a Bobcat

Update: appears our ID of this poor little soul was wrong and it's not a bobcat, but a domestic cat (perhaps feral). Has me a bit surprised - I saw the carcass, and while it was quite torn up and deteriorated, it really looked like a bobcat. Pelt color, spots, tail, head... But I guess teeth don't lie and that lil pre-molar behind the canine is the tell - Felis catus have it, and Lynx rufus don't.

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About a year ago a friend found a dead bobcat on a trail by our family lodge. Being wise in the ways of the woods, he hung the carcass in a tree so the yellow-jackets could strip it clean, and we could recover the bones later. The resulting washed-up skull has an interesting tale to tell...

Introducing Bob the bobcat:


Adult western bobcats, Lynx rufus, are about 20-25 lbs (10kg). Kinda like a 
really big tabby cat. The skull size suggested male, but I can't be sure.

Top-down view of Bob:


Mountain lion skulls are almost twice the size of bobcat skulls,
and not quite as flat-faced. Their teeth are bigger as well.

Looking at this angle, it doesn't take much of a forensic scientist to see what happened on the trail that fateful day - it appears that Bob ran into the bitey end of a coyote...


Pattern and size of bite mark say the culprit was a Canis latrans

Canine tooth distance and overall pattern are consistent with coyote. Gray fox jaws & teeth are about 1/2 the size and may be too small to break through a skull with a bite. Besides, gray foxes are about the same size as a bobcat and would not wanna mess with all those teeth & claws.

I'd edu-guess Bob got outnumbered by the pair of local coyotes we see roaming around (even chasing deer), and have caught on my cam traps. Adult coyotes are typically 30-40 lbs, and two of them would be a tough match for a 20-25 lb Bob. Btw - a 10lb difference might not sound like a lot until you think of it in scale - it's 1/2 again the body weight of the bobcat. That's a big difference. It's a 160 lb fighter vs. a 240 lb fighter (or two!). Which would you bet on?


The two local coyotes trying to dig a frozen deer dinner from under the snow

But maybe there's a little more to the skull story. It appears Bob might have been an older cat, and getting a little short in the tooth:


Bob the bobcat also had a broken front fang

That can affect feeding and thus health, and make it even harder on an ole bobcat in a fight. But that's the ways of the woods. At some point, we all have a bad day. Hopefully, Bob had a whole lot of good ones beforehand.

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For my bobcat readers out there feeling sad for their friend that died to help me tell this tale, here's an uplifting counter-point story...

Good Day to be a Bobcat
(note: not the same bobcat as featured above)

One day last spring while exploring a field near our fenceline, I heard a sharp snap and snarl from beyond the fence. I turned and in the field just 50 feet from me a bobcat was zig-zagging in high-pursuit of a western gray squirrel. The bobcat had been hiding in a big pile of dead manzanita snags, and the field-foraging squirrel was now running for the woods like his life depended on it. It did. The amazingly agile cat caught the tree squirrel just 3 feet from a big pondy pine. Here's the series I snapped as the grayback cat stopped to give me some stares, and then saunter off with the snack...









Note: this series may also one day be seen on a post titled "Bad Day to be a Gray Squirrel."

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References:

• Mark Elbroch - Animal Skulls: A Guide to North American Species
• Wikipedia - Bobcat
• Wikipedia - Coyote

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