DFW Urban Wildlife

Dateline – Winter and Spring 2021 – Lewisville, Texas

It quickly became apparent that this was a real Bobcat hotspot shortly after I setup my trail camera in this part of the Trinity River bottomlands. I’ve certainly camera trapped plenty of Bobcats in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this much activity or this many individuals in one spot before. Multiple Bobcats appearing multiple times a day, in front of multiple cameras—all within a hundred yards of each other—is simply an unusual occurrence.

An exact count of Bobcats is difficult to determine. There are at least two—and possibly several more—that patrol these slough beds with some regularity. I placed these cameras in late December, and for weeks I would record the occasional Bobcat squeezing past one of my cameras while bypassing the standing water. This level of activity continued through the winter, including during the unusual hard freeze we had in mid-February.

By March the weather had warmed and the slough water rapidly dried up. That is when the Bobcat activity began to pick up significantly. These dried waterways provided clear, vegetation free pathways that were perfect conduits for wildlife trying to navigate these thick bottomland woods. The resident Bobcats readily put these makeshift thoroughfares to good use.

In mid-March I began getting photographs of a pair of typically solitary adult Bobcats patrolling together. This all cumulated with a picture of the two cats mating right in front of one of my cameras. This was the first time that I had ever recorded Bobcats engaged in this type of behavior.

Shortly afterwards Bobcat activity fell back to a more expected level. In fact, it may have dropped off even more significantly than that.

In the place of the Bobcats came Coyotes. Starting in early April, as the number of Bobcat photographs steadily decreased, the number of Coyote recording began to go up sharply. Traveling the same ground as the Bobcats, these Coyotes began triggering my trail cameras with increasing frequency. It wasn’t long before the Coyotes also began appearing in multiples. Springtime in the North Texas bottomlands! See the picture below…