Week 9Spring Week 9
I have never lived a moment not yearning to undo the damage.
—Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle
One fine spring morning the dog and I came across a female pileated woodpecker pulling chunks of wood out of a stump in a neighbor’s yard. The dog froze, arrested by the sight of this giant bird, but the bird paid us no mind. She was focused on the stump in that intense, almost animatronic way of pileateds. I hurried the dog home and came back in the car, figuring I would be less apt to startle her with my camera if the lens was at least partially obscured. Even the most human-habituated birds tend to flee when they’re pointed at, and I have never known a pileated woodpecker to become truly habituated to human presence. They are the very embodiment of wildness—pterodactyls clinging to the sugar maple trees.
I had taken several pictures, careful not to lean out the window, when the bird suddenly stopped her work and hopped to the top of the stump, poised to fly. I was still taking pictures, so I didn’t figure out right away that I was not the one who had spooked her. Finally, at the very edge of my viewfinder, I noticed two front legs, out of focus from the difference in depth of field. I looked up expecting to see a large dog attached to those legs.
It took a moment for my own field of vision to adjust, for my mind to fit the unexpected pieces together:
Stunted tail.
Spotted legs.
Lean, feline flank.
Muscled shoulders.
Eyespots on pointed ears.
Fangs.
Fangs?
I gasped. It was a full-grown bobcat. In broad daylight. I had never seen such a magnificent animal in the wild. I’ve seen red foxes and coyotes and great horned owls and rat snakes and opossums and at least one massive raccoon. But even my backyard trail camera has not found evidence of a bobcat.
The cat stalked across the front of the house. The woodpecker watched every measured step, swiveling on the stump when the cat took a hard right at the property line. She flew away only when the cat was parallel with the stump, hardly more than one bobcat-leap away.
I, on the other hand, just sat there. Unmoving. Disbelieving. It was nine o’clock on a sunny spring morning, and a bobcat was calmly walking to the edge of the yard and crossing the street, right in front of my car.
When it reached the other side of the street, it disappeared behind some bushes, following the dry creek bed that channels runoff after rainstorms. That route would take the cat to a culvert beneath the main road that runs along the edge of our neighborhood. The culvert leads into a little wooded area on the other side of the main road—those woods were once slated for a commercial development before neighbors hastily arranged for a zoning change to prevent it—and from there to a twelve-month wet creek. Following the bobcat’s likely path in my mind, I realized that the creek leads to and from many other creeks that crisscross this water-threaded town. Once it was safely out of our neighborhood, the cat would be following what amounts to a wildlife corridor through the heart of Nashville.
Still, I sent a photo to a wildlife rescue center to ask if I should be concerned that this famously secretive creature was so openly walking around our suburban neighborhood. It’s rarely a good idea to relocate a wild animal—they are nearly always safer in their own territories, where they know the food and water sources, the hiding places, the opportunities to nest or den up—but this bobcat had me worried. Should I get the state wildlife agency involved?
Absolutely not, the expert at the rescue center wrote back. “Wildlife species we usually don’t associate with suburbia can actually thrive in places where we live, particularly highly adaptable species like bobcats. This one does look to be a very healthy adult, so it would definitely be best to let it be.”
I never saw the bobcat again, but friends on the other side of the main road have seen it. Haywood has seen it twice. It seems to be thriving. There are fewer rabbits in the neighborhood.