Back into the wild: Rescued bobcat set free after rehab. 'She took right off'

A young bobcat rescued last summer and rehabilitated over the last several months has been returned to the wilds of northwestern Rhode Island.

On Sunday night, the bobcat was brought from the Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island in North Kingstown and released in privately owned woods in Glocester's Chepachet village, according to Arianna Mouradjian, director of operations at the clinic.

"She took right off," Mouradjian said. "It literally lasted three seconds."

Although their numbers have increased in recent years, bobcats are still a rare sight in Rhode Island. This one was rescued when she was only about six weeks old and weighed two pounds. Apparently orphaned and hungry, she had climbed into the kitchen of a Glocester camp, probably looking for food.

Since then, she has lived in a 10-by-20-foot outdoor pen at the clinic, where Mouradjian and her colleagues gave her time to grow big enough to fend for herself in the wild. "She has to be of a size where she can compete with the other bobcats that are out there," Mouradjian said previously, adding that she could also face competition from coyotes.

Feeding herself will likely be the bobcat's greatest challenge, according to Mouradjian. At the clinic, most of her food was delivered, but rehabilitators were encouraged when they noticed she would hunt the mice that got into her pen trying to steal her food.

"Now she has to chase rabbits and catch them," Mouradjian said. "We know she knows how to hunt and is in very good physical condition."

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To help her adjust, rehabilitators will leave food in the area for a while. They plan to put it by a trail camera, which is their only way to monitor the bobcat, since she wasn't fitted with an electronic tracking device.

Her strong sense of smell will probably also help her find deer that have been killed by cars and gut piles left behind by hunters.

The timing of her release is good, Mouradjian said, even as fall turns to winter. Now about six months old, the bobcat is about the age where they normally leave their mothers. And, she said, bobcats "are very well suited to the winter climate."

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Overall, the release went well, according to Mouradjian. Catching the wild cat posed the biggest potential problem. They tricked her by leaving a baited cage in her pen. She was trapped within about a half hour. "She wasn't very pleased with that turn of events," Mouradjian said.

If that hadn't worked, Mouradjian would have had to catch the powerful cat by hand. "Neither one of us would have liked that," she said.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island frees bobcat rescued last summer