Vermont’s 851 bobcat records are a striking tally for so secretive an animal, and they cover all 14 counties, from Chittenden and Addison along the Champlain Valley through Washington County south to Windham, with the Green Mountains and Green Mountain National Forest forming the wooded spine of the map.
Snow gives the cat away
More than a third of Vermont’s records arrive from January through March, with February the single strongest month. The explanation is written on the ground: a bobcat crossing a snowy logging road leaves a line of rounded, clawless tracks that no summer walker would ever notice, and winter also opens the breeding season, when cats range farther and move more by day. Bobcats lack the oversized snowshoe feet of the Canada lynx, so deep powder costs them, and they manage by keeping to ledges, dense softwood cover, and packed travel routes.
Woods, ledges, and the farm-forest mosaic
Named records cluster in Green Mountain National Forest, with smaller counts at Jericho Research Forest, Bomoseen State Park, and Niquette Bay State Park, a list that mixes higher-elevation forest with lowland wetland and lakeshore. That range of settings is the point. The bobcat hunts rabbits, hares, squirrels, and rodents wherever thick cover meets open hunting ground, and Vermont’s patchwork of second-growth woods, swamp edges, and old fields suits it from the mountain spine to the Champlain shore. Even so, most Vermonters have never seen one; a winter track is the closest contact most people ever get.
Status in Vermont
NatureServe ranks the bobcat S5, Secure, in Vermont, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
