Outdoors
The BDN outdoors section brings readers into the woods, waters and wild places of Maine. It features stories on hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation and recreation, told by people who live these experiences. This section emphasizes hands-on knowledge, field reports, issues, trends and the traditions that define life outside in Maine. Read more Outdoors stories here.
What may be Maine’s first black bobcat has been spotted in the state, where a homesteader says the animal has killed most of his chickens and two ducks.
Rodney Barnett II, who runs the Good Ground & Grit Facebook page, said 10 of his chickens went missing two days ago. He noticed the bobcat while checking on his goats. It was sitting on a fence post, watching the animals.
“I got probably 20-30 feet from it, when I realized, this is the largest cat I’ve ever seen in my life,” Barnett said.
The animal’s unusually dark coat is consistent with melanism, a genetic trait that produces excess melanin, the pigment that gives skin and fur their color. Even with a black coat, a melanistic bobcat can still have spots and stripes visible beneath its fur.
Melanistic bobcats are exceptionally rare, and there are no confirmed records of one in Maine. Most documented North American cases have come from southern Florida. A 1990 review documented 10 Florida occurrences dating to 1939, while a later review found that 13 of 15 previously reported North American occurrences were in southern peninsular Florida.
The unusual coloration has also been documented much farther north. The first known Canadian melanistic bobcat was trapped near Henry Lake, New Brunswick, in 1983. Five additional occurrences were later documented in the province, including one trapped near Cocagne in 2016.
A black bobcat was also reported near Danville, Vermont, in 2020, when a resident captured video of the animal. In 2022, a North Carolina deer hunter killed a black bobcat and sent a photograph to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, which he said verified the animal as melanistic.
It’s unknown what, if any, advantage the dark coloration provides. A 2024 study in Florida’s Greater Everglades found melanistic bobcats in just 25 of 9,503 photographs. Researchers believed the photos were of the same animal and suggested its dark fur could provide camouflage in densely vegetated, low-light environments, although they could not establish whether melanism helps the animals survive or reproduce.
For the homesteader, the unusual sighting has come with a difficult problem. The bobcat is continuing to prey on his livestock, and he has been trying to protect the animals that remain.
“I’m just a little discouraged that we’ve lost so much in so little time,” he said.
Just yesterday, Barnett watched the bobcat carry off one of his last chickens and chased after it.