This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue
The Bobcat Bonanza Explained
By Ed Ricciuti
Just as I sat down on a cold morning this past February to begin writing this article on how, in the ’burbs and even cities, bobcats seem to be coming out of the woodwork or, more precisely, the woods, I realized that I had forgotten to water my chickens. As I trudged through the snow, I saw tracks trailing out of my woody swamp and circling the coop. If I needed a muse, there it was—proof that a bobcat had been contemplating a chicken dinner during the night.
CT Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (CT DEEP) offers an interactive map of
current sightings of bobcats in the state at portal.ct.gov/deep/wildlife/fact-sheets/bobcat. Photo: CT DEEP.
Not that many decades ago, seeing a bobcat or even tracks in my Connecticut neck of the woods was an extraordinary event. Nowadays, bobcats are so commonplace that photos people take of them are plastered all over social media. This is one indicator of how bobcat populations are booming in our region and, indeed, throughout most of their range. Perhaps more than three million individuals inhabit a vast swath of North America, coast to coast from southernmost Canada to southern Mexico, minus a swath of Midwestern prairie.
In the Northeast, New Hampshire and Vermont count as states close to the northern limit of bobcat territory. Beyond that they are replaced by their slightly larger cousin, the Canada lynx, whose huge, fur-soled paws enable it to snowshoe through snow cover that would bog down a bobcat. “They don’t like deep snow,” says Brehan Furfey, lead furbearer biologist of Vermont’s Wildlife Division, so less severe winters may be a plus for North Country bobcats.
Massachusetts and Vermont use regulated hunting and trapping to manage bobcat populations. Connecticut and New Hampshire protect bobcats. Photo: CT DEEP.
Biologists from state wildlife agencies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont all report thriving bobcat populations. In Massachusetts they are moving east from strongholds in the central and western parts of the state. From southwestern New Hampshire, they have spread through the state with one notable concentration in the Connecticut River valley. Vermont has bobcats statewide, with a concentration in the Champlain Valley, and they have been reported in every town and city in Connecticut where they even prowl the streets of densely populated Bridgeport and Hartford.
Connecticut has some really whopper bobcats, with occasional males reaching 40 pounds, according to Jason Hawley, supervising wildlife biologist of the state Wildlife Division’s programs for furbearers and black bears. It’s not surprising because New England, in general, has some of the biggest bobcats anywhere. This is in part due to a diverse prey population that makes for a prime diet, but also because large bodies have a smaller surface area to lose heat and more internal volume to produce it—believed to be the reason why many species of mammals grow larger in the northern parts of their range. A behemoth of a male weighing 45 pounds was recorded a few years ago in New Hampshire. Typically, males weigh 18 to 35 pounds, while females are significantly smaller.
While it’s a stretch to say bobcats were on the brink of extinction, they were gone or exceedingly sparse in most of their former range by the beginning of the last century. Like many other predators, bobcats were hit with a double whammy: wildlands that supported them were converted to agriculture, thereby removing habitat; and they were largely considered nuisance animals threatening livestock and game, so were subject to unregulated and even bounty hunting and trapping.
Proper wildlife management by states have turned the tables, and bobcats recovered, along with healthy chunks of their habitat. Some states now protect them, others regulate hunting. Virtually the only state losing bobcats is Florida, where introduced Burmese pythons have swallowed a sizable portion of the population there.
A bobcat caught on a trail camera in the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Bobcats now are sharing the limelight with the American black bear as the poster animal for wild creatures thriving in places chock-a-block with people. It’s a phenomenon I explored in my 2014 book, Bears in the Backyard, about wild animals returning to suburbs and even cities, reclaiming their own turf, so to speak.
I noted then that environmental conservation efforts starting in the 1970s, inspired by the first Earth Day, enabled wildlife populations that had holed up in scraps of remaining habitat to rebuild their numbers. Conservation of urban wildlife, at the same time, became trendy, a fact not missed by biologists when they applied for grants to fund their research. Meanwhile, animals were showing a remarkable ability to adapt to living alongside humans and started to emerge from their wildland strongholds. “It’s not that we are encroaching on them, but they on us,” says Dave Wattles, who heads the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife black bear and furbearer project.
Contrary to a common public perception, suburban development can benefit bobcats, as it does deer, says Hawley. Bobcats prosper in the “ecotone,” the transitional edge where two different biological communities meet, and there is no better example of it than where woodland adjoins lawn. More than 70 percent of Connecticut, for instance, classifies as Wildland-Urban Interface, a term for where residential development and fire-prone forest meet and mingle. That makes for prime wildlife habitats, often at one’s doorstep.
Backyards can be bobcat heaven, not just because of habitat but also because people often inadvertently make their yards an exceedingly happy hunting ground. “We have great habitat in New Hampshire and an abundance of small mammals,” explains Jacob DeBow, furbearer project leader for New Hampshire’s Wildlife Division, “particularly around backyard bird feeders. With a lack of other major predators and no known population-level diseases, bobcat populations have been able to grow.”
“Birdseed supports huge rodent populations,” Wattles adds. Indeed, bird feeders draw a host of species bobcats prey on, from rats and mice to squirrels and whitetail deer. Yes, deer. Wattles has seen deer—often a fawn—killed and cached by bobcats. Up to 30 percent of fawn mortality is due to bobcats, says Hawley. Overall, however, biologists throughout the region agree that bobcat predation has negligible, if any, impact on deer populations.
Wildlife biologists have zeroed in on the ways in which bobcats and other animals impact one another’s population dynamics and, ultimately, survival, technically known as interspecific interactions. There are some doozies that have caught their attention.
A prime example is the relationship between bobcats and fishers, the feisty member of the weasel family—mustelids—whose populations have been restored by wildlife agencies, notably in Connecticut, where they were reintroduced in 1988. “There are known relationships between fisher and bobcat with both competition of prey and direct mortality,” says DeBow. “This relationship has been documented both ways, large bobcats predating on smaller fisher and larger fisher predating on smaller bobcat.”
Bobcats likely have the upper hand, though. Fishers den and raise young in tree cavities. “Bobcats wait on the ground for the female to come down and then grab her,” says Hawley. Bobcats also take a toll on turkeys and gray fox.
State wildlife biologists in the region seem to differ somewhat on how bobcats and coyotes get along. Coyotes and bobcats prey on similar species so there is some overlap, but coyotes have a much more varied diet, are even omnivorous, so competition is not extreme. Besides, notes Hawley, coyotes chase down prey in the open, while bobcats are ambush predators. They prefer to lie in wait under thick brush and barberries. Coincidentally, the shaded, damp conditions under Japanese barberry make it a tick hotspot. “If there are ticks, there probably are bobcats there,” says Hawley, noting that tick habitat often makes good cover for an ambush predator.
As with bears, as bobcats increase, so do potential conflicts with people. The tracks around my hen house are evidence enough that they will prey on domestic animals. A well-built coop bars them entry, but free-range chickens are a bobcat buffet table.
Massachusetts and Vermont use regulated hunting and trapping to manage bobcat numbers. Connecticut and New Hampshire protect bobcats. New Hampshire, says DeBow, has enough bobcats to sustain a regulated hunting and trapping season, but have no plans to change its policy. Conceivably Connecticut, where they have been protected since 1972, may have sufficient numbers as well, but, given the outcry from animal lovers whenever a bear season is proposed, the likelihood of a bobcat season seems remote.
The fact that people are seeing more bobcats, moreover, may not be entirely a numbers game. Bobcats may have been crossing backyards by night for years, in our midst all along but escaping notice, until revealed by cameras snooping on every move they—and we—make.
Ed Ricciuti has been writing since the 1960s, including about science, nature, and conservation around the globe. He was a curator at the New York Zoological Society (now Wildlife Conservation Society) and a consultant for the World Conservation Strategy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.