WALDO, Maine — A hungry bobcat broke into a local chicken coop this weekend and killed more than a dozen birds, and when it returned later to feast on the kill, the homeowner caught it on camera.
“You don’t expect to walk into a bobcat,” Jerry Weaver said Monday of the previous day’s wild encounter. “It was much bigger than a coon cat. It had a thicker neck and really pointy ears.”
When the startled bobcat jumped to get out of the chicken coop and away from Weaver, it did so with a single mighty leap, propelling itself out of a gap in the wall and loping rapidly into the woods.
“It’s part of the rural life. We’ve lost birds before. We have predators. It’s something that happens,” said Weaver, whose home sits off Route 137 in this community of under 800 residents near Belfast. There also is a lot of undeveloped land behind his home, he said, but for the big cat “to be that bold … is a pretty big deal.”
His son, 14-year-old Ravi Weaver, had gone to feed the animals on Sunday morning and noticed too many feathers in the coop, which is located about 60 feet from the family’s house. Then he saw the “huge pile” of dead birds lined up on the hay bales that banked the inside of the coop.
“It was like they’d been put there neatly,” Ravi said of the collection of Cuckoo Marans, barred rock and Black Australorps that had been killed by a predator.
At least four chickens were gone entirely, his mother, Melinda Weaver, wrote in a Facebook post about the daring raid and about the family spotting some big paw prints in the snow.
“Evidently this winter is getting to all the creatures,” she wrote.
Jerry Weaver went back out to the coop later that morning and saw the cat had come back.
“We startled each other. That round we had 25-30 seconds of staring at each other,” he said.
Then, about an hour and a half later, he went back and this time brought the camera with him. The cat had returned and Weaver’s camera shows it moving around the coop — a partial wood-framed structure that is enclosed with a garage canopy.
Maine Game Warden Chris Dyer said the current “good old Maine winter” has been posing challenges for all kinds of animals, including bobcats.
“The deep snow is actually working against the bobcats,” he said Monday. “They’re finding it hard to find food. When somebody has a coop of chickens and they can find a way in, that’s easy pickings for them.”
Bobcats are common in Maine, apart from the northwestern portion of the state, according to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife fact sheet on the carnivore.
“They are reclusive and are rarely observed in the wild, although they appear to be habituating to urban and suburban settings. Deep snow will force bobcats closer to towns and residences in search of accessible food, causing an increase in bobcat sightings and complaints,” the fact sheet stated.
Adult male bobcats weigh 20-30 pounds and average about three feet in length. The females are smaller. All bobcats have short ear tufts. Unlike lynx, they have small feet, so snow reduces their mobility and ability to catch prey.
According to Dyer, in the wintertime their prey includes deer, which they hunt and kill, and also rabbits, squirrels and birds. Bobcats often will cache the remains of a large kill and revisit it until they’ve eaten most of it. The solitary cats have a large territory — about 36 square miles for adult males and about 18 square miles for adult females — and when there are humans around, they are most active at night.
Dyer said he recommends the Weavers secure the chicken coop but that they leave the dead birds outside for the bobcat to take away. Otherwise, it might come back and keep trying to kill more of their animals.
“Just make sure that things are closed up. Otherwise, this problem could really get bad for them,” the warden said. “Generally, bobcats are just looking for an easy meal. They’re not going to mess with people if they don’t need to.”