Bobcat 'harvest' remains level
But more bobcats are taken with traps than with guns or arrows
A bobcat and her kittens cross a road in the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge in Marion. (Flickr/USFWS)
By Ted Cox
The Illinois bobcat “harvest” remained level this season, but for the first time in the four years it’s been legal more were taken with traps than with guns or arrows.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources recently released final figures for the 2019-2020 bobcat season, finding that 306 bobcats were shot and killed or trapped and another 29 “salvaged” as roadkill. The 306 taken by hunters were exactly the same as last year’s harvest, but for the first time trapping gained the majority, with 155 trapped, 135 shot with a gun, and 16 shot with an arrow. An equal number of 159 were trapped or shot two years ago. This year’s three-month season ended Feb. 15.
Bobcats were endangered in Illinois for decades, but a revived population led them to be removed from the list of threatened species in 1999. The adoption of bobcat season began under the Rauner administration four years ago, when 141 were taken. Limits on the number of bobcat hunting permits were eventually raised to 1,000, and the limit on those taken was raised last fall under federal standards to 500. A hunter does have to have a bobcat license to salvage a carcass discovered as roadkill, and it counts against the limit of one per hunter.
The state has not approached that 500 limit, but the exact same 306 taken from year to year would seem to suggest a precarious balance. The Illinois Bobcat Foundation, however, pointed out in a Facebook post that the total number of bobcats taken has declined the last two years, as has the number of those salvaged as roadkill.
Environmentalists have stressed throughout that bobcats are stealthy and hard to detect, making accurate population counts next to impossible, and that as such the bobcat season threatens to undermine their recovery. They’ve also taken issue with trapping. Jennifer Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council, has charged that trappers were the main lobbyists behind the state’s bobcat-hunting law, stating, “We are concerned that this program is being pushed to meet the wants of special interests instead of basing this hunting program on science.”
Jack Darin, director of the Sierra Club’s Illinois Chapter, has charged that the motivating force behind bobcat season is “not for sport, for science-based wildlife management, but for the value of their pelts.”
This year, the boundaries for bobcat hunting were extended back to the original locations of three years ago — banned only in the northwest corner of the state, including Cook County. Pike County, just south of Quincy and across the Mississippi River from Hannibal, Mo., led all Illinois counties with 22 bobcats taken, 16 by trapping.