Babe

Meet Babe.

I did not take these pictures. Back in 2007, pretty much anyone who came to Upper Newport Bay in Orange County, CA, could see and photograph Babe whenever they felt like it. She was extremely visible, often parading her newest litter of kittens out in front of joggers and motorists in the middle of the day, not at all afraid of the crowds of humans who visited the popular area.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of Babe's kittens, and it appears the ocphotosite.com website no longer exists. As of 2010, she was apparently still alive (Click here for a little news story and photo.). But when I worked with her, it was back in 2007-2008.

I worked for the US Geological Survey for about a year studying the movement of bobcats and coyotes through urban corridors. It was a really interesting study. We drove around Newport Beach, Irvine, Tustin, Laguna Beach, Laguna Woods, Costa Mesa, Lake Forest, and Aliso Viejo monitoring the cats with telemetry, regularly checking a few dozen remote cameras we had set throughout the area, and trying to get more collars out on the animals. The main purpose of the study was to learn more about what the animals needed in a corridor, so that when the Orange County Great Park, which was in the process of being built on the old El Toro Marine Base, was completed, it could facilitate the movement of individuals between the Cleveland National Forest in the east and the San Joaquin Hills along the coast. (Interesting note: Will Smith's character was based out of the El Toro Marine Base in the movie Independence Day.)

Babe was already a pretty well-known cat before she was captured, which happened a few weeks before I got on the project. The capture crew had initially wanted to call her Tamale*, because she began to overheat while they were working her up. This happens occasionally, and they doused her with water and put alcohol on her ears to help her cool off. Eventually, though, they decided to call her Babe, after her habit of cruising Upper Newport Bay.

Unlike the collars we used on the mountain lions in Colorado, the bobcats had GPS collars that collected data points every few hours but could NOT be remotely downloaded. The data was stored on the collar, and when the collar's battery got low, it was programmed to automatically drop off the animal, and emit a different signal to let us know. Then we could walk in and retrieve the collar, plug it in, and get all the GPS data off of it.

Unfortunately, many of our collars failed. Often the drop-off mechanism would fail, the battery would die, and we would lose all ability to find the bobcat, relying then on spotting the cats on remote cameras and trying to recapture them to manually remove the collars. Thus, whenever we detected the drop-off signal, we weren't always 100% sure that the collar was actually no longer on the animal.

One day, Babe's collar started emitting that drop-off signal. Upper Newport Bay itself is a nature preserve, but it is surrounded by very densely populated neighborhoods and a handful of ritzy golf courses. Now Babe had been on her own for a while, having booted off her last litter of kittens, and had kind of disappeared out of her normal area for the previous few weeks. We actually feared she had gotten killed on the road somewhere. When Robert finally did pick up her signal, it was a few miles away from UNB in the heart of one of the neighborhoods. A day or so later, it started to give the drop-off signal.

So Robert set off to find it, eventually pinpointing it in someone's backyard. Robert knew there was the possibility that Babe was still wearing it, so he gave her a few days before walking in to retrieve it. When he returned, the signal was still there, so he got permission from the homeowner and walked into the backyard to get it. The backyard was small, lined by a row of hedges planted in a raised bed that backed up against the stone fence behind it. Robert crawled back behind the stickly, poky hedge with difficulty, came around a corner, and came face to face with Babe herself. 

She didn't act aggressive at all, but Robert immediately got out of there and told us the news. We easily figured she had had her kittens back there. It was quite a protected spot, out of reach of any coyotes or other bobcats that could kill her kittens, and sheltered from the elements. Our best guess was that the collar just happened to drop off there shortly after she gave birth, and her kittens were probably snuggling with it. We decided to give her a few weeks to get out of the area before trying to get the collar. Now, of course, we had absolutely no way of knowing where she was at any given time. 

And so, when the few weeks were up, they sent me in to try to get the collar. 

Robert and one of our supervisors, Lisa, came along. This time it was my turn to poke my head through the hedge. I dove in at the corner and cruised against the stone wall where the foliage was thinnest. When I reached the spot, I stared hard, trying to see through the darkness of the thick greenery. At first, I thought I could see a divot in the dirt, and eagerly moved closer to try to find the collar. But as my eyes adjusted, the dark form in front of me changed, morphed, took a different shape, until I could perceive the barely visible twinkle of a cat's eye against a dark bobcat-shaped head, tufted ears and all. She was still there. 

Again, she didn't react. I could have gotten a face-full of bobcat claws, since I was probably only about five or six feet away from her. I think she understood by now, after her years of frequenting the Bay, that we humans weren't likely to hurt her or her kittens, and bobcats, unlike canids, typically crouch and take cover when threatened rather than run for it. But needless to say, I got the heck out of there. 

 Eventually we were able to retrieve the collar, and Babe came back to Upper Newport Bay with a new set of kittens trailing behind her. She no longer had her necklace, just colorful earrings that she would have for the rest of her life. 

I don't actually know where Babe is now, if she's still alive, what happened to her, etc. Odds are, she got hit by a car, because that seems to be the fate of pretty much every urban bobcat in southern California. But she was one of our greatest tools in educating the southern California public about carnivores, letting them see the untamed beauty first-hand, and teaching them that bobcats can live alongside humans peacefully with no need for fear, as long as we maintain the appropriate distance and respect.

Regarding the bigger project, we ended up getting some interesting data from our cats. We found that in the more densely human-populated areas, somewhat removed from big expanses of habitat like Upper Newport Bay, the Laguna Coast Wilderness, and Crystal Cove, the bobcats were using whatever they could find to move around and build their territory. Two of our cats, named Homer and Sloane (both cats I got to help capture - Homer was my first), were caught right at the junction of the I-5 and I-405 freeways behind a Carmax Superstore. Both had almost completely linear home ranges along the riparian strip that wove between office complexes and neighborhoods. I don't know the status of the Orange County Great Park project, but I hope it's able to connect the east and west habitats, allowing more gene flow among the bobcats to help them maintain their populations in Orange County....because in this world of increasing distance between Man and Nature, the bobcats were the perfect ambassadors.

P.S. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you can find the final report of our project at the following link: Click here! Toward the end, in the appendices, are a bunch of really cool camera-trap photos, including some taken when a wildfire swept over our Cuddeback cameras without damaging them.

*Now that I have spent four months in Mexico, I feel the need to emphasize that the singular of "tamales" should be "tamal", not "tamale". That bugged our Spanish teachers to no end while we were in language class.