New Jersey’s 153 bobcat records hug the state’s northwest corner, with Sussex, Morris, Hunterdon, and Warren counties holding nearly all of them. It is the ridge-and-valley country, forested ridges, rocky ledges, and wetland-bottomed valleys, that carries the cat in the most densely populated state in the country.
A northwest stronghold
The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, Wawayanda State Park, Sparta Mountain, and the Kittatinny Valley form a connected run of big woods and ledge country where a bobcat can hunt rabbits, squirrels, and small rodents with room to stay out of sight. South and east of that band the land fragments into suburb and farm, and the record fades with it. Even inside the stronghold, direct sightings are rare enough that tracks, cameras, and road crossings account for most of what is known.
Still a rare cat in New Jersey
The monthly counts are small and scattered, with modest bumps in February and July rather than a true seasonal wave. That thinness is real. Bobcats had largely vanished from New Jersey by the middle of the last century, and the state’s foothold today descends in part from a reintroduction that moved twenty-four cats from Maine into the northern counties between 1978 and 1982. A resident can spend decades in these woods without ever seeing one.
Status in New Jersey
NatureServe ranks the bobcat S2, Imperiled, in New Jersey. The species is native to the state, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
