A healthy adult cougar gets a close-up when it walks less than a foot from our trail camera

It’s been an active winter for animals around Osprey Acres.  Our family recently acquired a third trail camera and we’ve scattered them around the Wenatchee National Forest behind our house.

There’s been lots of cat activity – in the snow it’s pretty easy to keep tabs on the cougars and bobcats by looking for their footprints.  We also regularly see signs of snowshoe hare, coyote and squirrel.

Here are some of the recent highlights:

A Snowshoe Hare is caught mid-flight. These critters turn white in the winter to hide in the snow and brown in the summer to hide in the forest.

A Red-Shafted Northern Flicker on the nearest tree to our house

This is one of the first good pictures we got with our new (inexpensive) StealthCam

So close and yet so far – this bobcat stopped two steps shy from becoming a spectacular sunrise photo. Sigh.

A few weeks later we saw a bobcat in the same location

In addition to the trail cameras that are out in the field, we had a neighborhood Bobcat that we frequently saw from December-January.  About once a week we had tracks or brief sightings (sometimes only inches from our bedroom window).

Bobcat tracks heading down our driveway and past our guest suite window

This cat walked right through fresh bird and squirrel tracks

Amanda spotted the cat along our road one afternoon and phoned Jeff and Ian who jumped in the truck with the zoom lens on the camera.  What followed were several minutes of watching it hunt through a foot and a half of snow in a neighbor’s field.

Several times we saw this cat driving headfirst into snow trying to snag rodents like mice that were burrowing below.