Animal · United States, Mexico, Canada
Bobcat
Lynx rufus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The bobcat is a wild cat about twice the size of a house cat, named after its short stubby tail, which is only a hand long. It lives across most of North America, but is so shy that few people ever see one.
Picture credit: gailhampshire (CC BY 2.0) · National Marine Sanctuaries (Public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the bobcat live?
Home: Forests, scrubland and deserts across North America.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United States, Mexico, Canada.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 70-100 cm long, 30-60 cm at the shoulder. It weighs about 9.6 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A bobcat hunts mostly at dawn and dusk, and rabbits and hares make up the greater part of its meals. It creeps close through cover and then springs, and when food is scarce it can bring down prey much bigger than itself. Each cat patrols a home range that it marks with scratches and scent, and males cover far more ground than females. The tufts on its ears and the ruff of fur along its cheeks make the head look wider than it really is. Bobcats were trapped in huge numbers for their fur in the last century, yet they got along well with farmland and even with the edges of towns, and today there may be around a million of them in the United States alone.
Find it on the globe
Bobcat is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why is it called a bobcat?
The English name comes from the tail: it is bobbed, meaning cut short, and measures only 9 to 20 centimetres. In other languages the cat is named after the reddish brown coat it wears in summer.
Is a bobcat dangerous to people?
Hardly. A bobcat weighs about as much as a medium dog and avoids people, so attacks are very rare. Most walkers in North America never notice one, even where the cats are common.
What is the difference between a bobcat and a lynx?
The bobcat is itself a lynx, one of four species in the group. Next to the Canada lynx it is smaller, has shorter ear tufts and much smaller paws, because it does not have to walk on deep snow.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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