Idaho’s 129 bobcat records sketch three different Idahos. Ada County’s Boise foothills lead with 24, Power, Butte, and Custer counties mark the sagebrush country of the southeast, and Bonner and Kootenai anchor the forested panhandle.
Rimrock over deep snow
Unlike its cousin the Canada lynx, the bobcat is not built for deep powder; its smaller feet sink, and prolonged crustless snow shuts down its hunting. What it handles superbly is broken country: canyon rims, talus, lava flows, and rocky draws where it can den and ambush rabbits and rodents from cover. Idaho’s record matches that preference, running through the lava country of Craters of the Moon National Monument, the foothill canyons of Boise National Forest, and the edges of big wilderness like the Selway-Bitterroot and the Frank Church-River of No Return, rather than the high, snowbound interiors. It is a cat of rimrock and brush, and even there it is far more often caught on a trail camera than seen.
Two humps in the year
Reports crest in January and again in midsummer, with a strong November beside them. Late winter is breeding season, when males travel widely and snow on the ground records every crossing, while the summer rise coincides with kittens leaving the den and beginning to trail their mother on hunts.
Status in Idaho
NatureServe ranks the bobcat S4, Apparently Secure, in Idaho, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
