Darkness came early; I beckoned Jack, the cat, to come inside but he stopped, uneasy, and stared into the woods. There was a sound unlike any I’d ever heard. Not at all like the snort of a deer warning its young, then the sound of deer running through the woods. This sound was different, and it didn’t run. There was thrashing, a scream, but no running.
Even I, unafraid of the dark, stepped back inside. There was something wild out there. “Sam,” I called out, not taking my eyes off the woods, “There’s a noise.” He didn’t hear me.
I stepped back outside and heard the noise again, more thrashing that stayed close, not moving away. “Sam,” I called a little louder and a little more frantic, “bring a flashlight.”
Sam came. “The big flashlight’s battery is dead,” he said. He wrangled with a lesser one, slapping it on his thigh. If there’s anything hard to find when you need it it’s a good flashlight.
“What did it sound like?” he asked.
I couldn’t describe it, not a deer, not a bird, not a cat … or was it?
Later in the week I shared with Prairie neighbor Ralph Stewart that I’d love to have free-range rabbits, but Sam says they won’t last here.
Ralph laughed, “Once I was sitting on our back porch that faces the woods. Out from the woods ran a rabbit straight at me then he hung a fast left. Right behind him was a bobcat in hot pursuit. When the bobcat saw me he literally did a flip over backwards and headed back into the woods. I figured I saved that rabbit.”
I thought about the scream that night. “Caterwauling,” they call it.
“So you think we’ve got bobcats out here?”
“Oh sure,” Ralph said. Then he told of a pinewood thicket off of Artesia Road where bobcats prowl.
The Mississippi Wildlife and Fisheries Department at Mississippi State University provides information on bobcats in the state. Bobcats are nocturnal and crepuscular, hunting in those few hours of twilight. They are opportunistic carnivores, as Sam describes possums that cruise our porch.
Bobcats eat squirrels, mice, rats, beaver, wild turkeys, deer — both adults and fawns — but their all-time favorite is the bunny rabbit.
Like Ralph said, a favored habitat is pine thickets, also hollow logs, trees, and old beaver dams make good shelters for bobcat dens. Bobcats live rather solitary lives and they are territorial, not too unlike Jack, our domestic cat, but they are twice as big as a house cat, sometimes bigger.
Bobcats have their own predators to worry about — coyotes, hawks, eagles, owls, other bobcats, but most often it’s us and our vehicles.
And rabbits have more to worry about than just bobcats. Ralph said he, too, was thinking about getting some rabbits.
“Are you going to free-range them?” I asked.
“Nah,” Ralph answered. “I’m going to eat them.”
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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