Alabama’s 305 bobcat records run nearly the full height of the state, from Baldwin County’s 39 along the Gulf coast through the fall-line hills of Pike and Bullock counties to Madison County at the Tennessee line, a fitting spread for a cat at home in almost every kind of cover Alabama grows.
A generalist among pine and hardwood
Bobcats hunt by stealth rather than chase, working thickets, stream edges, and overgrown field margins for rabbits, cotton rats, squirrels, and birds, then resting up in rock piles, hollow logs, or dense brush. Alabama’s record reflects that flexibility, with reports from the longleaf and scrub country of Conecuh National Forest on the Florida line, the oak and pine ridges of Bankhead and Talladega national forests, and the managed pinelands around the Wehle Nature Preserve. For all that, the cat keeps a solitary, mostly night-shift schedule, and even in occupied country most Alabamians never see one.
The record quickens in the cool months
Reports crest in January, March, and November. That cool-season weight fits the cat’s own calendar: courtship and mating peak in late winter, when males range well beyond their usual circuits, and by late fall the year’s kittens are leaving their mother and striking out for ground of their own. More animals on the move simply means more chances for a track, a trail-camera photo, or a brief crossing in headlights.
Status in Alabama
NatureServe ranks the bobcat S4, Apparently Secure, in Alabama, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
