Indiana’s 91 bobcat records huddle in the south-central hills, led by Monroe, Johnson, Brown, and Bartholomew counties, with Hoosier National Forest, the Charles C. Deam Wilderness, and Yellowwood State Forest anchoring the named places.
A comeback in the hill country
By the middle of the twentieth century the bobcat was rare enough in Indiana to earn a place on the state’s endangered list, its forest and thicket habitat largely cleared for farmland. As the rough, unglaciated hill country of the south regrew into woods, the cat worked back in from neighboring states, recolonizing the ridges and ravines of the Hoosier National Forest country first. Indiana removed it from the endangered list in 2005. The record still tells that southern story: the flat, intensively farmed counties of central and northern Indiana produce only scattered reports. Even in the hills, this is a cat detected by trail cameras and tracks far more often than by eye, and most Hoosiers in occupied country never see one.
Active all year, met by few
Reports arrive in every month, with January and June the strongest. Late winter is breeding season, when males travel well beyond their usual ranges, and by early summer the year’s kittens are out of the den and beginning to follow their mother on hunts. A round four-toed track with no claw marks in mud or dust remains the likeliest encounter.
Status in Indiana
NatureServe ranks the bobcat S4, Apparently Secure, in Indiana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
