Pocket Gopher

The owl guru, who is now an owl/bobcat guru, took an AWESOME photo of a bobcat carrying a rabbit he had just caught in Del Valle on Christmas Day. I therefore got it in my head to go to Del Valle myself a couple of days later and look for bobcats. It had been a rough year, one that I rang in on New Year’s Day by seeing my first bobcat ever (and it was a spectacular sighting, too), and I figured I deserved to close it out with my own awesome bobcat sighting. The owl/bobcat guru has seen bobcats in Del Valle several times before, so I figured it was a good place to go looking for them. So I drove on out there and headed off towards the trail she’d seen her latest bobcat. I hadn’t gone terribly far when a man stopped to talk to me. Folks in the parks around here are generally really friendly when they see my camera and will often let me know if they’ve seen anything cool. Well, this guy asked me what I was hoping to take pictures of and I confessed: bobcats. Turns out he had just seen one a few minutes before! I’m sure it’s no surprise that I of course didn’t see this alleged or any other bobcat that day, and I was honestly feeling rather depressed about it, but then just before I was going to head home, I saw a pocket gopher, which I’d never seen in the wild before. In fact, I’d never seen any pocket gophers in my life – or even knew they existed – until I moved here and saw a couple at the wildlife hospitals, because pocket gophers don’t exist on the East Coast. This little guy was very industrious.