Researchers Tracking Rhode Island Bobcats

KINGSTON, RI—Bobcats call Rhode Island home and their sightings have been on the increase in recent years.

But the reclusive, resourceful animal still remains a bit of a mystery here in the Ocean State, and experts don’t really know how many live here or how they survive.

At the University of Rhode Island, researchers are now starting to get an insight into the lives of the state’s bobcats, starting with one that has already offered a surprising revelation about the size of its stomping grounds.

The five-year research effort is led by URI Professor Thomas Husband and RIDEM Wildlife Biologist Charles Brown.

The captured bobcat entered a trap at the school’s East Farm in November and was fitted with a GPS collar, which will help the scientists track its movements every day for about a year.

A bobcat near a trap at URI. (Photo: Amy Gottfried Mayer)

Brown said the collar collects data on the bobcat’s location every two hours. It also transmits a signal to a hand-held receiver, allowing the researchers to follow it from a distance. When the researchers get within 100 yards, they can download the GPS data, which they managed to grab roughly every week.

“This bobcat is wandering a lot farther than we expected,” Brown said. “We’ve tracked him to Snug Harbor, Bonnet Shores, Matunuck, Charlestown. We’ve lost track of him for a few days at a time as he wanders, but we always catch up to him.”

Bobcats are the most widely distributed feline in North America, where they live in deserts, mountains, prairies and coastal regions. Weighing up to 35 pounds, they eat a wide variety of small mammals and other prey. In Rhode Island they are believed to consume mostly rabbits, squirrels and rodents.

The animals have been sighted in nearly every community in mainland Rhode Island. The hotspots seem to be in South Kingstown, Westerly and Foster, but they are also known to travel through densely populated areas of Cranston, Warwick and West Warwick.

URI Research Associate Amy Gottfried Mayer checks a bobcat trap. (Photo by Todd McLeish)

URI Research Associate Amy Gottfried Mayer is responsible for the day-to-day monitoring of the collared bobcat, as well as for ongoing efforts to capture additional bobcats in box traps. She maintains up to 10 traps distributed in the southern portions of South Kingstown, which she baits with dead ducks, rabbits, squirrels and other animals. She opens the traps every Monday, checks them each weekday morning, then closes the traps on Friday.

Mayer said the animals are turning out to be very difficult to trap. She uses a variety of visual and scent lures to attract the animals to the trap, but so far just the one animal has entered and been captured. Yet she knows that bobcats have come close.

At each trap, a motion-sensing camera takes pictures of any animal that approaches. At one site the camera recorded three young bobcats sniffing the trap, while two different adult bobcats were photographed at another trap. The collared bobcat has also been photographed at a trap. And one bobcat even put its head and foot in a trap. But no others have entered the trap completely.

Brown says that it is difficult to get a bobcat to enter a confined space, but he believes that their hesitancy to enter the traps also has a great deal to do with the weather.