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Here kitty, kitty!

Blockhouse Valley game cam spots bobcat in the wild


A game cam on the Blockhouse Valley farm property of Jim Disney caught this shot of a bobcat walking through the area on Thursday afternoon, Oct. 22.
Bobcats – or at least one – are alive and well in central Anderson County.

Jim Disney, who has a 10-acre farm in Blockhouse Valley, caught a rare photograph of one of these wildcats on one of the game cameras he has set up on his property.

“The camera captured the image around 2 p.m. last Thursday (Oct. 22),” Disney said. He shared the photo on social media, where it surprised a lot of people.

“I have several game cams set up here on my farm on Blockhouse Valley,” he told The Courier News.

“I have lived out here for almost 40 of my 60 years and have seen a plethora of deer, raccoon, turkey, and coyote populations. I’ve seen lots of coyotes out here. This is the first cat I have seen. He is beautiful!”

He said he’s hoping to get more images of the bobcat on his cameras – and perhaps more than just one, if the cat has a family in the area, which is likely.

The bobcat sighting comes on the heels of several reports of black bears seen around the area in recent weeks, including in some Clinton and South Clinton neighborhoods.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has this to say about the bobcat:

“The bobcat (Lynx rufus), also known as the red lynx, is a medium-sized cat native to North America from southern Canada, most of the contiguous United States to Oaxaca in Mexico. It is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List since 2002, because it is widely distributed and abundant. Although it has been hunted extensively both for sport and fur, populations have proven resilient, though [are] declining in some areas.”