Blurry BOBCAT

A few days ago I made a post about a cat that was not a bobcat. This post is about a cat that IS a bobcat!! If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I am obsessed with finding bobcats. Yes, I post more often about raptors, which I adore, but I SEE way more raptors. Finding raptors isn’t really much of a challenge around here. Bobcats are much more challenging, but the reward is also higher. I am pretty sure I saw my first bobcat late last year on the Muddy Hollow trail in Point Reyes, however, he took off before I could get my camera to my face and thus I have no proof. Then on New Year’s Day this year I had what will likely be the best bobcat sighting I will ever have, when a bobcat in the Marin Headlands posed for me for over 10 minutes. Later in January, I saw a bobcat walking near the road that exits Coyote Hills park, but when I pulled over to get my camera, a car exiting behind me pulled around me and scared the bobcat off. I’m even more certain about that sighting than I am the first one from last year, but again, I can’t prove it. In March, I briefly thought I saw another bobcat in Coyote Hills, but it ended up being an overactive imagination on my part and was just a bobcat-colored feral cat. I was pretty bummed about the latter, but just a couple weeks after that I was rewarded with another REAL bobcat. I was in Sunol Regional Wilderness and I was looking HARD for wildlife. Some days when I’m out hiking, my mind is elsewhere and I’m not always taking in my surroundings as closely as I could, but that day I was scanning the land and sky very closely, looking especially for raptors and bobcats, though not really expecting to see the latter. Somehow, though, as hard as I was looking for things, this bobcat startled the hell out of me, coming up out of the long grass! He was running away from me and honestly I wasn’t even 100% sure what it was at the time, but fortunately my reflexes were fast enough this time to get my camera positioned and the shutter fired a few times before he was gone. The resulting pictures are blurry, so this post isn’t about showing off any meager photographic skills I may have, it’s about bragging that I saw my FOURTH bobcat (or second confirmed-with-photos bobcat)!!