Hunted to Near Extinction, Bobcats Are Edging Their Way Back

Today, the species is on its way to becoming a quiet success story.

Speaking in early August to a sold-out crowd in a renovated barn at the wildlife center, conservation biologist Shauna Weyrauch said the bobcat population in Ohio is estimated at several hundred, as they slowly return from surrounding states. Nationally, the bobcat population is around one million, according to the National Park Service.

With dark spots on rust-colored fur, bobcats average about 16 pounds for a female and 22 pounds for a male, about twice the size of most housecats. They derive their name from a naturally short or “bobbed” tail that is about 5 inches long.  

Loners built for speed, bobcats are one of six wild cat species in the United States. The bobcat and the similar Canada lynx, found in Canada and near the Canadian border in northern U.S. states, have increasingly secure populations. Three other species—jaguar, jaguarandi and ocelot—have dwindling populations and a precarious future. The mountain lion, or cougar, presents a mixed picture—expanding across the Midwest but threatened by habitat loss in California and the Southwest.

Weyrauch, a senior lecturer at Ohio State University (OSU), told the Ohio Wildlife Center audience about her research on bobcats and the motion-activated outdoor cameras, or trailcams, she uses to observe them. She straps some cameras to trees and inserts others via PVC pipes into underground doghouse-sized dens she has created in her study area, the university’s 227-acre eastern-Ohio forest laboratory. This has resulted in a million photos and videos since 2022.

What Weyrauch calls “armies” of OSU undergraduates have organized the images, some of which were projected onto a screen above her head as she spoke. Ph.D. student Xinzhu Zhang is analyzing them; her results will define the types of territory bobcats like best—with forest cover and proximity to streams, for example.

OSU’s forest laboratory has sufficient prey for bobcats, including their favorites—raccoons, rabbits, mice and other small mammals. The area is not an old-growth forest, though, which would have lots of big fallen trees and the hollow logs that bobcats favor as places to birth and raise their kittens. In making the dens, says Weyrauch, “I wanted to do something tangible that could promote the recovery of bobcats.”

In addition to bobcats, numerous species check out Weyrauch’s dens as potential living space—though no animal of any species has yet moved in. Trailcam images show weasels, foxes, groundhogs and others peeking into or exploring the burrows via their drainpipe entrances. A raccoon got a big laugh from Weyrauch’s audience when he did a pull-up on a den’s central ceiling beam and used it to scratch the top of his head vigorously—then came back another day to do it again. A bobcat stopped by with her kitten and, as if to say “Dibs on this den!” peed on its entrance, marking it with her scent.

Weyrauch hopes that as the dens continue to “age into place” they’ll be occupied. Going forward, she will try another design: 6-foot-long, 18-inch-diameter culverts cut in half horizontally and set on the ground with the open side down.

After the lecture, Weyrauch signed copies of her newly released children’s book, The Boy and the Bobcat (Mascot Kids, 2025). Written with wildlife photographer Dutch Gordon and illustrated by Rachel Novel, the book tells the story of a child who dreams he’s become a bobcat. In his nighttime fantasy, he interacts with other forest animals and learns about values they embody, like respect and tolerance. By teaching children these principles in a wildlife context, the book encourages protection of both bobcats and the natural world they inhabit.

“When we think about conservation, we always think of the next generation,” Weyrauch says. “How to get them excited and caring. When I see kids get excited about bobcats, it feels really good.” The cats are beautiful and charismatic, she says. “Who wouldn’t want to learn more about bobcats?”

Moreover, Weyrauch says, “They’re native, they evolved here, and they’re part of what makes an Ohio forest an Ohio forest. So it’s great to have them back.”

The bobcats’ return to Ohio will help establish a more diverse, more stable and healthier ecosystem for all its components, humans included, according to Rebecca Rose, the wildlife center’s Conservation Liaison. Commenting on Weyrauch’s lecture, she says, “People want stories that give them hope.”

Second chances

Veterinarians at the Ohio Wildlife Center hospital care for 9,000 rescued animals annually, according to Executive Director Heather Tuttle. Many are then released, while others are transferred to centers looking for just such animals for their displays.

Some, like the center’s resident bobcat Athena must continue to be sheltered there because their injuries were so serious they can no longer survive in the wild. Now one-and-a-half years old, Athena was hit by a car as a kitten. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and ended up with cognitive disorders—just as might a human with a serious head injury, Tuttle says.

“While she can eat and drink and run and play, she has lost all her fear response, all hunting instincts—all her survival instincts,” Tuttle explains. “She will remain with us her whole life.” 

After the lecture, audience members took a short outdoor walk to see Athena, as well as the other animals housed in the center’s large tree- and shrub-filled enclosures. Athena sat back regally on her haunches, head held high, toes together, and watched with dignified interest as the crowd chatted and snapped her photo.

Athena’s neighbors, each in its own enclosure, include Audrey the bald eagle, a representative of another species making a comeback in Ohio and nationally. Audrey must continue to live in the center because she can’t fly; she fell out of the nest as a chick and broke a wing that didn’t heal properly.

In another enclosure, shy, diminutive Casper the coyote is not the snarling aggressor most people expect. Correcting false stereotypes is an important result of the public’s visits to the wildlife center, according to Tuttle. Some animals—flying squirrels, opossums, turtles, hawks and others—have been named “ambassadors” and appear at events at the center. “It helps build the connection between our wild community and our human community,” Tuttle says.

As lovely and charming as you may find the center’s resident animals, Tuttle cautions, you should not be inspired to obtain a wild creature and keep it as a pet. For example, you shouldn’t be fooled by the numerous housecat behaviors that bobcats exhibit—purring, sharpening their claws on scratching posts and enjoying curling up in boxes. When they mature and their territorial defense mechanisms kick in, they may attack you, scratching and biting, believing your home is theirs and you are the intruder, Tuttle says. “They will not be happy. You will not be happy.”

Seeing the nimble, elusive bobcat in the wild is a rare treat, according to scientists who study them. Generally, you’ll glimpse little more than a shadow darting through the forest. While driving through the southern California desert, naturalist, wildlife biologist and former park ranger Kevin Hansen had a surprisingly close encounter with a bobcat after he caught sight of one 75 yards away. He writes about the experience in his important book about the species, Bobcat: Master of Survival (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Hansen stopped his truck and sat very still, watching through binoculars as the bobcat kept its eye on Hansen while zigzagging slowly through the surrounding underbrush and cautiously closing in on him. Suddenly, the big male emerged into the open, sniffed the air, stalked forward, peed on one of the truck’s front tires and trotted off.

“I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered or insulted,” writes Hansen.

Target on their back

Two thousand years ago, the Native residents of the area we now call Ohio esteemed the bobcat. The cats were memorialized in effigy pipes, one of which is in the collection of the Ohio History Connection, a Columbus nonprofit. European incomers who settled the North American continent years later had a very different stance. They believed that slaughtering predators, including bobcats, meant more game animals, such as deer and elk, for them.

We now know the reverse is true—getting rid of carnivores re-shapes their prey populations. After vast numbers of predators had been slaughtered in Ohio, deer and elk initially proliferated. However, these larger herds scarfed down so much foliage that they destroyed their food supply and many later starved to death. At the same time, they destroyed habitat for pollinators and birds. The environmental destruction burgeoned as the massive vegetation loss caused riverbank erosion, diminishing water quality and damaging fish habitat.

During the 1800s, settlers throughout Ohio unknowingly exacerbated the problem when they cleared the state’s forests to establish small family farms. In doing so, they eliminated or fragmented this preferred bobcat habitat, which provides niches for prey animals along with cover for the cats as they stalk their next meal. The Ohio countryside was transformed from 95% forested pre-settlement to just 10% by the early 1900s, according to Weyrauch.

The fur trade was another killer. Settlement of the continent launched what Hansen calls “a coast-to-coast assault on North American furbearers.” The peak harvest was during the 1940s, with 23.7 million animals, including bobcats and dozens of other species, killed in that decade alone, according to Hansen.

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was a heavy blow for the American bobcat. It was not among the animals listed for protection, so its soft, attractive pelt caught the eye of the fur trade and the fashion industry that it served. As one tracker told Hansen, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, “everyone became a bobcat hunter.”  

Until 1987: That fall, the booming fur market crashed in tandem with the stock market. Within a decade, bobcat populations were rallying, in Ohio and nationally, according to the Ohio Wildlife Center. By the early 2000s, the number of reported bobcat sightings began to increase steadily. “With bobcats returning, it’s like putting a piece of the puzzle back in place, restoring ecological integrity,” says Weyrauch.

As Ohio agriculture gradually centralized into larger farms and small ones were abandoned, the state rebounded from minimal forest cover to the 30% the Ohio Environmental Council estimates it has now. The Ohio Division of Wildlife calls reforestation “the major factor leading to the successful self-repatriation of many forest-dependent species, including the bobcat.”

Additional states, from Vermont to California, describe similar environmental patterns and wildlife revivals. The Harvard Forest Dioramas at Harvard University’s Fisher Museum are models illustrating the trend in New England from colonization to the present day. In numerous states, bobcats are now either fully protected, or partially protected with a limited trapping season.

In 2018, the Ohio Department of Wildlife floated the idea of an Ohio bobcat trapping season, says Weyrauch. Many people objected, she says. “We had so little information about their status. A few years earlier, they had just been taken off the state’s threatened and endangered list.”

In neighboring Indiana, a bobcat trapping season is set to begin in November, with tanned bobcat pelts selling online for hundreds of dollars. Weyrauch wonders what trapping bobcats accomplishes. With minimal overlap of individual bobcat territories, they are highly selective breeders that produce small litters, even just one kitten. “They aren’t going to overpopulate,” she says. “They self-regulate through their territoriality.”

Trouble ahead?

The reforestation and other environmental enhancements that support bobcats and other wildlife in Ohio and nationally face new challenges. Increasing deregulation promises to amplify toxins and other damage. In March, the Environmental Protection Agency released 31 directives it called “historic”—lifting restrictions on power plants, including mercury- and arsenic-emitting coal-fired plants; on greenhouse gases and other dangerous air pollutants; on wastewater discharged while producing oil and gas; on accidents at chemical facilities that use “extremely hazardous materials”; on vehicle emissions; and more.

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture is in the process of rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule on 59 million acres of public land. Weyrauch found that troubling. “Roadkill is the largest cause of mortality of bobcats,” she says.

In eastern Ohio, where she’s doing her research, a male bobcat’s territory averages 16 square miles, while a female’s averages about 6 square miles. In southern Ohio, where smaller prey populations require bobcats to range further for their next meal, male and female territories are about twice that. “You can imagine how many roads these bobcats are crossing every day,” Weyrauch says. “More roads, more crossings, more mortality.”

In The Boy and the Bobcat, Weyrauch and Gordon express a dearly felt hope: “May the bobcats’ tracks never again disappear from our forests or our hearts.”

Stephanie WoodardMore by this author →

Stephanie Woodard is an award-winning journalist who writes on human rights and culture with a focus on Native American issues. She is the author of American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion.