We had a couple of encounters with Bobcats this past weekend while hiking in and around the Village Creek Drying Beds in Arlington, Texas. Our first run in actually occurred while we were following a dirt trail out of the VCDB and into River Legacy Park. We were walking one way on the trail, and the Bobcat was coming back the other. We spotted each other roughly 50 yards/meters apart, and we all stopped dead in our tracks. I started shooting pictures, but the Bobcat was mostly obscured by vegetation. The cat calmly took a seat and considered us for a moment or two. Then, with palpable irritation, he turned and walked away in the direction in which he had came.
Later, towards the end of the day, we decided to make one more tour of the facility in our car. We turned down a little used dirt road, and there is the distance we spotted another Bobcat moving from one drying bed to another. The big cat crossed the road and sat down in a place that allowed him to survey the new bed for water fowls and rodents. When the Bobcat finally laid down, we exited the car.
Of course, the cat wasn’t happy with this development and he decided to beat a retreat. The Bobcat skulked away in a typical feline fashion, trying to avoid detection with a comically ineffective crouch-walk.
We managed a just few more fleeting glimpses of the bobcat as he disappeared into the gray and gold winter weeds.