Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Predators and Varmints Jumped a bobcat off a deer it had killed

My son and I came around a bend in a logging road and saw a large bobcat on a deer in the edge of the snowy road ahead. The cat ran into the timber. We watched for 20 minutes and then called with no luck. Photo above is as it lay. The bobcat had eaten a few bites from the under side of the lower leg and finished cutting off a broken hind leg when we arrived.

Tracks in the snow told the story. The bobcat had jumped the blacktail button buck and rode it till it went down and slid across the slightly sloping road. The buck got up and jumped back onto the slick ice center of the road where it apparently did the splits and broke its hind leg. It made another jump and went down for good, sliding to the edge of the road. From the mussed hair on the throat the cat apparently killed the deer by choking it, and that fits with photos we've seen of bobcats killing deer.



That was on Tuesday. On Friday we came back and the cat had dragged the deer into hiding behind the screen of brush along the road and had eaten all of the hindquarters. Below shows the buck on Friday that we dragged back to its original position on the edge of the road.