Sunday, January 4, 2009

Return of the Native

This evening, as I sat reading, I noticed something out the window, out of the corner of my eye. I looked up in time to catch a dark brown shape running across one of our frozen ponds. I saw it only for a second before it made the woods and vanished under low pine boughs.  It was no dog, certainly too small and dark for a coyote. Unmistakably feline, but too large for a house-cat, and tailless.  Bobcat.  Wonder of wonders.

I threw my jacket on and slipped into my boots in moments, and creeing out on the crackling ice of the (mercifully shallow) pond,  found the fresh tracks.  The cat had crossed Route 6 and hit the ice at a run; the prints in the snow were smudged from slipping.  I followed up the bank and there found clearer proof: tracks just slightly smaller than our dog, Blitz, clearly clawless, with the fore and hind prints falling almost together.  I began to trace the course of the bobcat's path, walking, then jogging along through the trees, till I crested the hill.  Below, the tracks continued on into the swamp.  It was getting dark, the pink of dusk bleeding out a darker purple, and the cat was gone.  I stood for a minute, listening, watching, but there was nothing there but a line of prints in the snow.  I turned back.

In the grand scope of miracles, seeing a bobcat on a January evening is insignificant.  For me, however, seeing a bobcat was another milestone.  Bobcats aren't common in Connecticut, and I saw my first in the wild just over a month ago, as it crossed the road in front of my Jeep.  Yet the importance of these bobcats to me isn't their scarcity, but rather their sudden, seeming abundance.  I went 27 years without seeing a bobcat in the state, and now, miraculously, I've seen two.  There may not be an instant feline plague at work here, but there is a distinct trend, a trend at work across Connecticut, and New England in general.  A hundred years ago wild turkeys and whitetail deer were almost unseen here, rare almost unto death; today, the second growth hardwood forests of the region teem with them.  Here in CT, black bears are once again appearing in numbers unheard of since the 1800s, and my father, amongst others, has sworn that he's seen a cougar.  New England is in the process of re-wilding itself, and I'm bearing witness to the transformation.  I count myself lucky in that way, to be here for it, to speed it along in whatever small ways I can.  A lone bobcat glimpsed for a second out the window may not seem like much, but tonight, for me, it seems like a symbol of something potent, something deserved: a homecoming.

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