The Freemans Journal - Cooperstowns Newspaper Since 1808

Saturday, September 20, 2008

HADE HOLLOW

Lynda Selover looked out her back window the other afternoon to a surprise: There was what appeared to be a mother bobcat, along with two small kittens.
"I didn’t get the little ones, but got several pictures of her," Lynda said later. She lives on Route 33 along Red Creek.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation, after receiving a copy of the photo, confirmed the cat was a bobcat, not a lynx or any of other big cats that only occasionally are seen in Upstate New York.
Tom Sutter, a DEC biologist, said in the 25 years he’s been in the department he’s observed the bobcat expanding its habitat from the Hudson Valley into central and western New York, then down to the Southern Tier and into Pennsylvania.
"We’re seeing both all age classes and sexes" in Otsego County, he said. "If you’re seeing that, then you know you’re seeing a healthy population."
If the cats brought to their attention – either through road kills or trapping – are "big old males," that would suggest otherwise: that the population is just beginning to migrate into an area.
Otsego County is in the third year of a three-year "experimental" bobcat-hunting season that the first year yielded 20 cats and a few less the following year.
In most cases, DEC receives reports – more and more often, via the Internet – from drivers who see the bobcats run across the road in front of their cars.
While the population is growing, Sutter said, there’s little reason to worry.
"Bobcats are like a lot of species," he said. "They don’t want anything to do with us. In most cases, they will avoid us."
Almost exclusively, the big cats spotted in New York State are bobcats, Sutter said.
"We hear rumors all the time of ‘that other big cat,’ the mountain lion, but no sightings have been confirmed" east of Missouri, he said.

Labels: 10-03-08, Big Cat, Bobcat, Front Page