We have been seeing tracks and scat on the North End of the island, and on Monday I got a message from the Stoffel family (John, who took the photo below, and his daughters Casey and Mia, who are renting on the island.  He asks if we have bobcats on the island:

Back on Capers Inlet, we inched around a corner and halted when we saw this trotting toward us.  It trotted a few more paces and stopped, stared at us for almost a full minute, then edged off into the brush.  When it turned full sideways I had taken a look at some wood storks, so I missed the whole body.  My daughters both said it was brownish and spotty.

When I examine the photo, I think he’s right. It is consistent with the field signs up there and elsewhere on the island. There was also a dismembered raccoon head along Lake Timicau drive, which we can consider another field sign. So John and his daughters have captured the first photo of a bobcat on the island. Bravo!

When in Florida this winter, I learned some interesting facts about bobcats. We reported a large cat to DNR two years ago when Gary interrupted it stalking some young deer. After taking plaster casts of the feet (huge) and Gary’s description of the tail (long), we wondered if there was a cougar or panther on the island. Our DNR friends were pretty sure they were bobcat tracks. But what I learned in Florida was that barrier island bobcats, like raccoons, have evolved with much longer legs for slipping through the spartina grasses. In addition, they have longer tails to help with the balancing on those longer legs. (You can read about our mystery cat sighting here, and see our casts of the tracks.) There have been several reports of other large cats in the last year, and we definitely have followed bobcat tracks on the beach.

Bobcats can swim, too. Just this week, our good friends over at Coastal Expeditions posted a photo of a bobcat swimming in the waterway near Cape Romain on their facebook page (if you like cool nature pics, you should friend them– I love their news feed) and photo and story was picked up by the Post and Courier. You can get to the facebook photo by liking the Dewees Island Ferry page on facebook: the bobcat photo is posted there.

So keep your eyes peeled on the north end of the island…