By Morgan Wesson, correspondent
Daily Messenger
Posted Sep 11, 2009 @ 11:27 AM
East Bloomfield, N.Y. —

Having lived in this rural area his whole life, Chip White has seen his share of roadkill — everything from deer and raccoons to domestic pets.

But what he saw lying in Route 64 on his way to his family business, White’s Farm Market, on a recent morning made him do a double-take. Then he pulled over.

At first he figured it was an unusually large cat.

“Its head was twice the normal size,” he recalled. Its paws were huge.

But it was the markings that gave it away: This was no house cat. It was a North American bobcat.
“I pulled it over onto the shoulder and called the (Department of Environmental Conservation) to come pick it up,” he said. “People were heading to work about then and stopped to look at it. A lot of people didn’t believe it was a bobcat.”

In the few weeks since White’s sighting, images of the bobcat, snapped on cell phone cameras by several curious passersby, have found their way onto the Internet, and talk of the unusual roadkill has been quite the hot topic among locals.

Councilman Ron Hawkins took to carrying a printed image of the bobcat in his truck, offering it up to startled friends with, “Have you seen this?”

Stories of bobcat sightings have circulated elsewhere in the area in recent months. Rumors of one wandering about have been a conversation piece in Bristol, and the residents of the Holiday Harbour tract in Canandaigua say they were visited by one in July.

The Holiday Harbour bobcat “made a screeching noise” at a woman as she walked her dog, said Steve Rose, superintendent of maintenance for the waterfront condominium community. It was later spotted by different people heading toward Sucker Brook at dusk, and again in the morning nearby Yacht Club Cove.

There have been unconfirmed bobcat encounters even farther north. Webster resident Maureen Reardon said she twice spotted the animal in 2008, though she did not report her sightings to the DEC. “It ran in front of my car on two different occasions, on Gravel Road near Klemm,” she said. “I take that road home a lot. It was huge!”

Reardon checked the Internet to research the animals and confirm that she had seen a bobcat. She said, “I knew it was not a typical cat. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

The animal was pretty much wiped out hundreds of years ago when Western New York was heavily logged, said Mike Wasilco, a regional manager for the DEC. Their population seems to be on the upswing, though, along with that of bears, he said.

“Now as forests grow back, there’s a lot of habitat and bobcats are finding things to their liking,” Wasilco said. “Road kills are the only way we can get biological data on a species like this.”

A bobcat kill has never been found this far north, he said. “In the southern tier or Steuben County we get two or three bobcat roadkills a year,” he added.

Within minutes of White’s discovery, DEC officer John Stansfield was on scene. Wildlife Technician and Bloomfield resident Ron Newell advised Stansfield by phone to collect the animal for research purposes. White had meanwhile fended off one onlooker who wanted to take the animal home himself.

“That would not have been a legal situation,” said Newell. “Only the people who hit it have a legal right to do that. ... It is then at the discretion of the (DEC).”

Whoever struck the bobcat was long gone.

Bobcats are elusive predators who hunt at twilight and near dawn. They are named for their bobbing gait, the result of their longer hind legs. They prey on small animals, including mice, rabbits and squirrels, and have also been known to take young deer and, on occasion, smaller house cats. They live on average for 16 years in the wild; they most often fall prey to parasites — rarely automobiles.

“A bobcat has a very large territory. It’s a predator, but not a predator of people,” said Newell. “People don’t seem to get as excited about a bobcat as they do about a mountain lion.”

Wasilco and other wildlife managers are noting reports of a much bigger cat in upstate New York — the cougar. Sightings have been reported everywhere from Canandaigua to Newark, Wayne County. The latter, though, was proven to be a phony claim complete with a fake video taken off the Internet, DEC officials said.

“We haven’t had a cougar roadkill — there might be one around — but definitely not a population,” said Wasilco.

Once the White Farm bobcat has been examined, it may be taxidermied for educational purposes, if the DEC can come up with the several hundred dollars this costs.

“Money’s always an issue. Sometimes we can find a taxidermist who will give us a discount,” said Wasilco.