Whew, that's good. Don't want to be around any winter bats. THAT would be REALLY weird.
Talking Turkey( or how to catch a bobcat).
- Thread starter aristotle
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Whew, that's good. Don't want to be around any winter bats. THAT would be REALLY weird.
Of you see a bat in winter in Michigan, it'll be inside your house, because you've got a colony hibernating in the attic. In some parts of Kentucky, and certainly points south, it'll get warm enough to bring 'em out in the winter. If they don't find some bugs to eat pretty quick, they go back into hibernation.
No bats in our house, not even the baseball kind. Had a problem with ants, they are gone. So are the mice. LOTS of moles in the area. Once spring comes, if it ever does this year, they will be out in FORCE. They have been REALLY bad for a few years now. Now, we DO get bats out in the back garage. I like them. Keeps Michigan's Air Force (mosquitos) in check.
5 bobcats vs. coyote in a residential backyard in Shawnee,KS.
video: Bobcats vs Coyote - YouTube
video: Bobcats vs Coyote - YouTube
21cExp
Veteran Expediter
Well you never know what's going to show up on these forums or what memories it might drudge up.
I raised a bobcat kitten in the 70's.
Got it from a co-worker who had accidentally killed the mother while rabbit hunting in Georgia. He was keeping it in the trunk of his car in hot parking lot, in a burlap sack. Bought it from him for, I think, about twenty-five dollars just to get it out of that trunk and to get it fed and properly taken care of. He had had two kits, but one had died or been sold off; i cant remember. Best I can tell it was around three-four weeks old when I got him, maybe a week or two more.
I took him home, looked through my animal books for what info I could, and whipped up some simple formula based on cows milk. He was all muscle, tough as nails, that kit, and pretty much went through a pack of bottle nipples a night.
Handsome as hell too, with tufted ears outlined in black, spotted coat, typical stubbed tail, and a way of moving about that made you take notice.
I propped a huge pillow we had, about 36" square, in the corner on the couch. He'd climb up the front and go down the backside and sleep there most of the day, then prowl the apartment at night. He always had the same routine, sort of checking the outside edges of the apartment, with regular side trips into the interior at certain points. Bobcats typically hunt the same wide circles in the wild. It's one of the reasons they've been easy to trap and their numbers have decreased as populations have encroached.
I learned a lot about Bobcats and their northern, even more reclusive cousins, the wonderful Lynx.
I kept him for several months, and just about got kicked out of our apartment because of him:
Landlord: "I hear you got a wildcat in there!. Why you want a wildcat?l"
Me: "He's really pretty cool, still just a kitten, come in and see!"
Landlord: "Lawd no, that's a WILD-cat. You got to get rid of that thang. This ain't no place for that kinda thang."
He was right. I'd saved the kit from certain death in the trunk of that car and nurtured him to health, but he was getting way too big and rambunctious for an apartment the size of mine. I gave him to a friend of mine in Lexington; a guy whose knowledge of woods and woods creatures I respected.
He kept him for another few months in his bigger apt in Lexington, but admitted he had to sleep in the bathroom in the bathtub every night, as it was the only room that had a door and in which he could stay out of the Bobcat's nightly prowls around the apartment.
I soon ended up on a small little farm in NKY and gladly took him back. The Bobcat hadn't much liked being trapped again for the car ride north. When I got him back he was pretty much a young adult, around 26-28 inches. I gave him a room of his own in the little house I had. He quickly adopted the highest place in the room, atop a chiffarobe, as his sitting/resting place. I put a tattered blanket up there for him. The chiffarobe was behind the door as it opened, and I tell ya, even though the critter had identified with me as being his bottle-feeder and nurturer, and I believe still knew me when I took him back from the guy in Lexington, it was always with supreme caution that I entered that room, with him up there in greater control.
It was springtime and I kept two windows open to screens in his room. Wasn't but about a week and he figured out how to undo the hook on one of the screens and escaped. I figured he was gone for good, wandering the farms and fields of Boone County.
Well, he'd never learned to hunt for himself and his natural instincts evidently weren't enough to help him survive on his own, and he showed back up after a week or so. Shocked the sh*t out of me one morning, when I went out to pump water, to see him sitting in the weeds under the old wringer-washer by the back door, regal as could be and just as proud as anything, like he was invisible.
I watched him later from the kitchen window and saw he was limping pretty badly, and figured he must have gotten into some farmers chickens and took a pellet from a shotgun blast, or tangled with some farm hound, or lord knows what. Never really could tell, but I knew he was hurt and hungry and had at least a modicum of trust in me, or he wouldn't have returned.
I put out some raw meat that night that disappeared by morning. Then I started going down to the foot bridge across the creek between my little house and the road, and would catch big Blue Gills as he sat watching me from the tall grass on the other side of the creek.
I'd catch one, kill it, then flip it over to the other end of the foot bridge. Then I'd sit in the weeds on my side and watch him come up to eat.
We lived like that for a couple of weeks, me leaving bits for him here and there, him having a tenuous trust but nowhere else to go.
He eventually just wasn't there one day, and though I suspect things just got the best of him, I've always hoped he'd regained enough strength that he wandered off healthy and re-ready to face the wilderness on his own.
In retrospect, I should have just offered him to the Cincinnati Zoo as a kitten, though I can't help wonder, sometimes, if the way it ended up happening is the way it was supposed to, for each of us, a strange and unusual symbiosis between man and critter.
I know I have a different sense of nature and wild animals, and of my own place in the greater scope of things, because of my interaction with him.
I really hadn't meant for this to be this long, but realized how much memory was there that I haven't talked about in ages.
That's what happens on a Sunday afternoon in Little Rock while having a beer and pondering the past.
I raised a bobcat kitten in the 70's.
Got it from a co-worker who had accidentally killed the mother while rabbit hunting in Georgia. He was keeping it in the trunk of his car in hot parking lot, in a burlap sack. Bought it from him for, I think, about twenty-five dollars just to get it out of that trunk and to get it fed and properly taken care of. He had had two kits, but one had died or been sold off; i cant remember. Best I can tell it was around three-four weeks old when I got him, maybe a week or two more.
I took him home, looked through my animal books for what info I could, and whipped up some simple formula based on cows milk. He was all muscle, tough as nails, that kit, and pretty much went through a pack of bottle nipples a night.
Handsome as hell too, with tufted ears outlined in black, spotted coat, typical stubbed tail, and a way of moving about that made you take notice.
I propped a huge pillow we had, about 36" square, in the corner on the couch. He'd climb up the front and go down the backside and sleep there most of the day, then prowl the apartment at night. He always had the same routine, sort of checking the outside edges of the apartment, with regular side trips into the interior at certain points. Bobcats typically hunt the same wide circles in the wild. It's one of the reasons they've been easy to trap and their numbers have decreased as populations have encroached.
I learned a lot about Bobcats and their northern, even more reclusive cousins, the wonderful Lynx.
I kept him for several months, and just about got kicked out of our apartment because of him:
Landlord: "I hear you got a wildcat in there!. Why you want a wildcat?l"
Me: "He's really pretty cool, still just a kitten, come in and see!"
Landlord: "Lawd no, that's a WILD-cat. You got to get rid of that thang. This ain't no place for that kinda thang."
He was right. I'd saved the kit from certain death in the trunk of that car and nurtured him to health, but he was getting way too big and rambunctious for an apartment the size of mine. I gave him to a friend of mine in Lexington; a guy whose knowledge of woods and woods creatures I respected.
He kept him for another few months in his bigger apt in Lexington, but admitted he had to sleep in the bathroom in the bathtub every night, as it was the only room that had a door and in which he could stay out of the Bobcat's nightly prowls around the apartment.
I soon ended up on a small little farm in NKY and gladly took him back. The Bobcat hadn't much liked being trapped again for the car ride north. When I got him back he was pretty much a young adult, around 26-28 inches. I gave him a room of his own in the little house I had. He quickly adopted the highest place in the room, atop a chiffarobe, as his sitting/resting place. I put a tattered blanket up there for him. The chiffarobe was behind the door as it opened, and I tell ya, even though the critter had identified with me as being his bottle-feeder and nurturer, and I believe still knew me when I took him back from the guy in Lexington, it was always with supreme caution that I entered that room, with him up there in greater control.
It was springtime and I kept two windows open to screens in his room. Wasn't but about a week and he figured out how to undo the hook on one of the screens and escaped. I figured he was gone for good, wandering the farms and fields of Boone County.
Well, he'd never learned to hunt for himself and his natural instincts evidently weren't enough to help him survive on his own, and he showed back up after a week or so. Shocked the sh*t out of me one morning, when I went out to pump water, to see him sitting in the weeds under the old wringer-washer by the back door, regal as could be and just as proud as anything, like he was invisible.
I watched him later from the kitchen window and saw he was limping pretty badly, and figured he must have gotten into some farmers chickens and took a pellet from a shotgun blast, or tangled with some farm hound, or lord knows what. Never really could tell, but I knew he was hurt and hungry and had at least a modicum of trust in me, or he wouldn't have returned.
I put out some raw meat that night that disappeared by morning. Then I started going down to the foot bridge across the creek between my little house and the road, and would catch big Blue Gills as he sat watching me from the tall grass on the other side of the creek.
I'd catch one, kill it, then flip it over to the other end of the foot bridge. Then I'd sit in the weeds on my side and watch him come up to eat.
We lived like that for a couple of weeks, me leaving bits for him here and there, him having a tenuous trust but nowhere else to go.
He eventually just wasn't there one day, and though I suspect things just got the best of him, I've always hoped he'd regained enough strength that he wandered off healthy and re-ready to face the wilderness on his own.
In retrospect, I should have just offered him to the Cincinnati Zoo as a kitten, though I can't help wonder, sometimes, if the way it ended up happening is the way it was supposed to, for each of us, a strange and unusual symbiosis between man and critter.
I know I have a different sense of nature and wild animals, and of my own place in the greater scope of things, because of my interaction with him.
I really hadn't meant for this to be this long, but realized how much memory was there that I haven't talked about in ages.
That's what happens on a Sunday afternoon in Little Rock while having a beer and pondering the past.
You may have bats elsewhere. Do you have a tower that houses bells attached to your home?
Nope, it's just a very small (980SQFT) ranch, with a basement. No bell tower. No bells, no loud speakers, there is a good roof.
