Bobcat Making The Rounds In Vernon Neighborhood

VERNON, CT — A Bobcat has been making the rounds in a Vernon neighborhood this week.

A resident captured what appeared to be an adult bobcat roaming through a yard along the Reservoir Road/Route 30 corridor on Thursday. It's in the Lafayette section of town between Northeast School and the Exit 67 interchange of Interstate 84.

Though a busy commercial and traffic area, the section of town also features plenty of woods.

State Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and local Animal Control officials always urge caution with pets once a bobcat is sighted.

Bobcats have been making a "comeback" in Connecticut over the past half-century, DEEP officials said.

According to the DEEP, Connecticut's once-dwindling bobcat population was facing extirpation until 1972, when "unregulated exploitation" was halted, and the bobcat was reclassified as a "protected furbearer" with no hunting or trapping seasons. The bobcat population has since recovered due to improving forest habitat conditions and legal protections, DEEP officials said.

By 1825, DEEP officials said, just 25 percent of Connecticut was forested due to tree harvesting from agricultural activities and other uses of timber. Today, nearly 60 percent of Connecticut is covered in forest, and bobcats are regularly observed throughout the state, DEEP officials said.

"It is important to monitor the state's bobcat population because the presence of these top predators affects many other species, including prey species and competing predators," DEEP officials said.

In Connecticut, bobcats prey on cottontail rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, voles, white-tailed deer, birds, and, to a much lesser extent, insects and reptiles. Bobcats, on occasion, may also prey on unsupervised domestic animals, including small livestock and poultry, according to the DEEP.