As I promised

A couple days ago, I said I would post a map pointing out how the ocelots and bobcats partition the habitat they share. So I played around in ArcMap today (love this program even though most of the time it makes you want to place sharp, hot things in your eyes) and made a very simplified map of the 4 collared cats on my research site. Female ~3-4 years adult ocelot in red, ~1.5 years adult female bobcat in pink, ~1.5 years adult male bobcat in green, and ~3 years adult bobcat in blue.

It's a little crude, but you can very easily see that the ocelot spends all of her time in the thick brush. That's what ocelots like. Very much. They prefer 95% canopy cover! And it's a mid- and low-story brush. Seriously, folks, you have to belly crawl through this if you want in there. And it's THORNscrub. It pokes, it scratches, it's fierce stuff. I've provided a couple photos of that, too.





But ocelots love it.

Bobcats not as much. They will definitely use it. You can see male YB1 uses part of the area that the same ocelot, Y14, uses. He particularly likes this old road that runs through the area. He walks up and down that scanning for yummy things to eat and getting photographed by our remote cameras.

The female bobcat, YB2, uses the other protected brush area, but she mainly uses the area around the intermittent ponds, which is much more open than the rest of the brush. She also uses LOTS of open area. All the white that I did drawn in and code as brush is pretty much open rangeland of grass and occasional brush or trees now and then. But pretty much wide open.

The other male bobcat, YB3, is very young, like YB2. So he has been all over the place. He doesn't go in the thich brush pretty much at all. And he likes to move around a lot. He's young, and he's overlapping another male bobcat, which is just a little older than him (but still a youn adult). So it won't be a surprise if one day he is gone. Headed off to find a permanent home range for himself with a pretty female bobcat and no bigger, better males to take her from him.

And this is all just preliminary with about 20 or so locations. This data will get even better, even more reliable once we get up to 40 locations or so. And imagine in a year?!

Cool stuff.

Sunshine go away

I never thought I would say those words! But unfortunately, the quickly approaching South Texas summer heat may hamper our trapping efforts. Traps are checked at sunrise and any captured animals worked up and released well before noon, but safety of the animals always comes first. So when temperatures rise about 90 degrees for a certain number of days....well, it's time to close the traps for good.

Luckily, we will be resuming trapping as soon as the heat releases its grip; sometime in September or October.

So everyone keep your fingers and whiskers crossed that we get at least another week or two in before it gets too warm.

And pray for rain, clouds and cool breezes.


Research associate, AC, measures the paw width of a male bobcat. Bobcats are sympatric carnivores to ocelots. This simply means that they occur in the same geographical areas, or even have overlapping home ranges, but do not interbreed. Next post: some preliminary home range graphics where you can see this overlap.