This story by Liberty Darr first appeared in The Shelburne News on Oct. 12.
It was a normal morning for Shelburne resident Chris Latta as he cruised in his car down Clearwater Road near the train tracks one early Wednesday morning when he felt the uncanny sensation that he was being watched.
“I saw what I thought was just a cat with a stubby tail,” he said.
It’s not unusual for him to see a slew of different kinds of wildlife on his morning rides, he said, since the residential neighborhood is surrounded mostly by woods.
“We have bears, rabbits, turkey vultures and foxes,” he said. “All these animals live pretty harmoniously. We’ve got all this wildlife around us just kind of peacefully coexisting.”
But as he inched closer to the creature, he realized the feline was more than just the average house cat he frequently sees darting across the road, but a massive bobcat — the first time he had ever seen one so close.
“I didn’t think much of it until I got closer, and I said, ‘Holy crap. I got a bobcat,’” he said. “It really had no fear.”
It’s not unusual to catch a bobcat lurking on trail cameras in Shelburne, often with a gray squirrel or rabbit hanging from its chops, and although they may be a relatively common animal for the area, Declan McCabe, professor of biology at Saint Michael’s College, says it’s uncommon to actually see one.
“What I mean by that is they’re very secretive,” he said. “They’re very keenly aware of us and very good at avoiding us. One time with the trail cameras, we got a photograph of a bobcat and three minutes later, the next picture we got was a student picking up that camera. The student was completely unaware that he had been three minutes away from a bobcat.”
According to Brehan Furfey, furbearer biologist with the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, trapping and hunting data suggests that the state maintains a relatively healthy and abundant population of bobcats, and although development in areas like Shelburne and South Burlington remain on the rise, “trend-wise we haven’t seen any sort of massive declines or any sort of oscillations,” she said.
“They are pretty resilient, and they’ve shown themselves to occupy a variety of different habitats as opportunistic feeders, even with more development,” she said. “Granted, that’s not great for habitat for any species, but they tend to tolerate it.”
With some males reaching up to 35 pounds, Furfey explained that many people will confuse them for cougars or mountain lions.
“We don’t have those,” she said. “That’s not to say that it’s not possible but there’s never been one detected or positively identified and you would know a mountain lion or Catamount when you see it.”
Bobcats travel widely, both Furfey and McCabe said. Through a 2005 study that involved trapping and putting radio collars on bobcats and monitoring their movements, the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife and University of Vermont found that the home range size averages 9 square miles for females and 27 square miles for males.
“During breeding season, the males will have a larger territory,” Furfey said. “But generally, without the breeding season or outside of the breeding season they don’t really tolerate each other very well,” noting it’s uncommon to see two adult bobcats together in the same area.
Wetland habitats usually provide excellent corridors for them to move freely about to gather food, which are often found in residential areas like Shelburne and South Burlington.
“People often talk about wildlife corridors, but in our context, in Shelburne and South Burlington, it’s patches,” McCabe said. “They’re going from patch to patch using neighborhoods in between.”
In an environmental assessment report of Shelburne done by Arrowwood Environmental last year, the consultant applied a value-ranking process to identify 49 different habitat areas of at least 20 acres within Shelburne.
The two highest-ranked habitat blocks already have some level of conservation protection in place — Shelburne Pond with the H. Laurence Achilles Natural Area and the LaPlatte River Marsh Natural Area at the mouth of the LaPlatte River — but in almost all these cases there are unprotected portions that remain at risk, the report says.
Gail Albert, the former chair of Shelburne’s natural resources and conservation committees, explained that this report is planned to influence the zoning bylaw update currently underway. According to her, the answer is not to inhibit development, but to outline exactly where to properly place denser housing and populations.
“If we’re enlarging our housing, we really need to be thinking about how we’re placing it, and it’s always been my feeling that we don’t want to inhibit people from living here,” Albert said. “What I want to do is have people who already live here recognize what’s really precious about their property.”
Around this time of year, it’s common to see a female with her young kittens scouring for food as she teaches them to hunt, but usually by winter, the young are independent and establishing territories of their own, away from others.
“They’re very aware of each other’s territory,” Furfey said.
