Tam-Cattin' Around

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I went all the way up to Mt. Tam and didn't even get as far as Rock Spring. A marine layer of fog bathed the lowlands, and Mount Diablo's peaks looked good rising above it, but not as good as last time. Besides, I soon spotted suspicious activity off to the north. A look through binoculars confirmed it was a bobcat, so I parked and headed out along the Coast Trail on Bolinas Ridge to have a look.

The cat was headed my way along the trail, so I stopped and waited for him to come into view. He disappeared behind a rise, and I waited and waited, then decided to go have a look. He should have come into view by then, and I didn't want to lose him. It was only after I finally left him about three hours later and hiked back up the hill that I realized what had taken him so long. Right there in the trail was a fresh gut pile. He must have just made a kill.

He didn't like being surprised and galloped down the slope toward the woods, then stopped to get a better look at me. He kept going down the hill but didn't enter the woods, so I figured what the heck. I'll go down there too.

This was a male in his prime, not some jittery junior kitty, and he wasn't too troubled by my presence. The photo above was shot with a 35mm lens. The red arrow indicates where the cat was.

He made a perfunctory pounce at one point, but mostly he snoozed in the cool shade.

And scritched and scratched a little.

I continued to follow him when he moved out of the shaded area.

When I saw him head toward this log I wanted to start running so I could get in better position, but I didn't want to startle the cat, so I hustled gingerly.

I was psyched to photograph him giving his claws a little workout.

He climbed down the other side of the log and entered the woods. I thought I'd lost him, but I followed anyway and emerged in the meadow where I recently found the beer-bottle "offering" in a hollowed-out oak tree. I was surprised to scan the area and spot the bobcat very close by. He was comfy in the fresh green grass and made no attempt to flee. In fact he snoozed quite a bit and didn't move out of bed for a little more than an hour. 

A group of Steller's Jays that had been mobbing something I could not see, finally spotted him after their mobbed quarry left the area. They didn't make any audible alarms for the bobcat, but instead flew a few feet over his head. They would fly from one tree, gliding and dipping directly over the cat, almost like counting coup, then rise to land in another tree.

I was flummoxed at one point when a human suddenly came into view. There is no trail there. What the heck?! "Excuse me, sir!" I called out, waving an arm to help him see me. "Could you walk around, please? I've been watching a bobcat right in here for about an hour." I wondered if he was a mushroom-picker, but I think he was just some guy like me who likes to hike off the trails. He walked around the cat and got a good look at one point. "Is he hurt? He's not even bothering to look at me!" I told him I'd just seen the bobcat hunting and that he was fine, and the guy kept on hiking down the hill, entering the woods with a lot of crunching that I could hear long after he was out of sight. I would soon find out that the Matt Davis Trail cut through just 40-50 yards below.

Not long after that, the bobcat got up and stretched, then headed into the woods as well, looking back to make sure I was following.... I got a nice clear shot of his distinctive nose and could certainly recognize him if I'm lucky enough to see him again.

I tried to fire off a few frames as the cat walked through the woods (much more quietly than I was able to), doing the best I could with a 1/10th-second exposure.

I loved watching the cat move through the woods, using a fallen tree to cross a barely wet ravine, but it was impossible to get a clear enough view to make any photos. When he disappeared I once again thought he might be gone for good, but before too long I spotted him in an adjacent field.

I snapped this shot with the 105mm to show the lay of the land. Anyone familiar with Mt. Tam will recognize the trees on the hilltop. The Doug fir on the right is the "iconic" tree.

I was glad to catch the bobcat in open sunlight for a change, but the fog threatened to blow in and send the landscape and everything on it into obscurity. Luckily, the fog dissipated almost as quickly as it arose.

All of a sudden the bobcat reached a hiking trail. I noticed the cat used trails quite often. He also did a lot of scent-marking along his route and had left a scat on the Matt Davis Trail back in the woods.

Unfortunately, despite it being a Friday in January, several groups of hikers were using the trail, and the cat turned off to head downhill once again to avoid them. And once again he took me through the woods. I would have lost him for sure, but I simply stuck to the trail. When the trail finally opened up I scanned the fields to try to pick  him up again.

At first I thought this was my guy, but then I realized it was a second bobcat. She kept an eye on me, then became agitated by something down the hill to my left and scurried uphill into the nearby woods. I figured she'd been spooked by "my" bobcat and went looking.

There he was, in an open area above the chaparral. We'd come far enough down the mountain that trees and grassland were giving way to dense brush. Stinson Beach is in the background, obscured by fog and salt spray from huge waves thundering into shore. The cat soon disappeared into the chaparral. I heard a strange wailing sound that I first took to be a bird, but realized it most likely was the cat. Talk about territory. That cat was all over the place and knew his trails by heart.

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Tam-Cattin' from John W. Wall on Vimeo.