Bobcats!

This morning we discovered that there are TWO bobcats nearby (I wonder if they were BOTH on the roof the other night!)… and that they are adept at catching squirrels for breakfast. I know it’s nature being nature, but it’s still sort of a shock to watch it happen. Anyway, a little while after the first sighting, I looked out the window again and saw one of them drinking from the water bowl we put out for the birds, rabbits, and squirrels! (Yes, we’re trying to hard not to feel like we set the poor squirrels up! But in the years we’ve been doing that, this is really the first predator, beyond the occasional hawk that we’ve seen.) I was able to take a bunch of photos, but since they were taken through the window screen and the angle of the sun was really bad, I’ve had to photoshop them a lot to get anything recognizable. So they’re not amazing photos, rather grainy and weird, but you can see the bobcat at least!

This is the best drinking shot, as it was looking up and you can see the eyes better, and you can see the tufts of furr on the tips of the ears, a little bit:

And this is a shot of the bobcat after it was through drinking. It’s walking away, but it’s a decent shot of the tail itself – I didn’t know they curled a bit at the tip:

And this last one is the bobcat disappearing into the sage on the hillside – they’re bigger than domestic cats, but still only about 30 pounds, best guess. Probably more than I want to run into at night though: