Arkansas’s 97 bobcat records split between the state’s two classic landscapes. Greene County in the northeast lowlands leads with 10, but the weight of the map sits in the Ozarks, where Newton, Carroll, Baxter, and Benton counties stack up along the Missouri line.
Bluff country and bottomland
The Ozarks suit a bobcat well. Rocky bluffs and ledges offer den sites and dry shelter, while regrowing hillsides and field edges hold the rabbits and rodents it hunts by stealth. Records from Ozark National Forest, the Buffalo National River corridor, and Mount Nebo State Park trace that broken, wooded country. The cat is no stranger to the other Arkansas either, working the thickets and root tangles of bottomland hardwood country to the east. In both regions it keeps largely to the night shift, and most Arkansans living in occupied country never see one.
A winter-weighted rhythm
Reports arrive in every month but crest in January and March, the heart of the bobcat’s breeding season, when males travel farther and cats of both sexes simply move more. In the leafless woods of late winter, a round four-toed track with no claw marks, the signature of a cat’s retractile claws, is the encounter most people actually get.
Status in Arkansas
NatureServe ranks the bobcat S5, Secure, in Arkansas, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
