Bobcats are par for the (golf) course in North Texas

Jim Jolley wasn’t surprised to find a bobcat sunning herself mere feet from him on Texas Star Golf Course’s No. 15 tee.

As a volunteer golf marshal, the retired commercial pilot has watched bobcats and other critters cutting across fairways, tee boxes and greens searching for food and otherwise living large on the course’s 275 acres.

“I could hear her purring,” Jolley said. “She opened her eyes, looked at me, then closed them again. I stood there watching her nap for about five minutes, then I walked off.”

Ample water and dense swaths of native trees and grasses preserve habitats on the public golf course in Euless, but it’s hardly alone as a home to wildlife in North Texas. A variety of animals and migratory birds can regularly be seen at courses across the region, from Texas Star to Waterchase Golf Club in Fort Worth to Tierra Verde Golf Club in Arlington. Armadillos, raccoons, opossums, coyotes, turtles — even wild hogs and nutria — all frequent the links in these parts.

Bobcats, of course, are on the prowl as well.

A college student working on her masters in wildlife biology chose Texas Star — along with Westdale Hills Golf Course, also in Euless, and Waterchase — to fuel her thesis: Urban Bobcat Study.

With help from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Julie Golla, a Utah State University student, trapped 14 bobcats between January and April 2014. Ten were large enough to wear GPS tracking collars designed to fall off after one year. After documenting their health and appearance, she released each cat where it was caught and tracked where they went.

The answer: just about anywhere they wanted to.

“Urban carnivore is a new sector of wildlife research, a new field,” Golla said. “Cities are expanding, exploding outward, and more of these animals are adapting. Understanding how they live among people is important in order for the bobcats to stay in their habitat and the people to be safe.”

But people’s safety rarely is an issue with bobcats, Golla said. One of her goals is spreading the message that the state’s up to 1.3 million bobcats (according to a 2009 Texas Parks and Wildlife estimate) don’t deserve to be lumped in with cougars, bears and other dangerous North American predators.

Bobcats are about twice the size of house cats and range throughout North America, Golla said. Males average 23 pounds; females, 17 pounds.

And, while the data Golla is still studying hasn’t yet suggested how many bobcats inhabit the study area’s 49,000 acres — covering parts of Fort Worth, Northeast Tarrant County and Arlington — it has shown that they can range about 5 miles along rivers and through woods within their territories. Golla hopes the humans who share those bobcats’ territories can be persuaded to coexist with them.

“We wanted to give the public actual facts instead of hearsay so they can decide how to coexist with wildlife,” Golla said. “They don’t create issues so long as the relationship remains just observing each other.”

Derek Broman, a Texas Parks and Wildlife urban biologist, said when most incidents involving bobcats and people happen, humans are at fault.

“People need to stop feeding these animals,” Broman said. “They’re associating humans with food sources, and the negative encounters start with feeding, especially hand feeding. Ultimately, someone gets bitten.”

However, neither humans nor their pets are on bobcats’ menus, Broman said.

“Bobcats don’t want to prey on something that will fight back,” Broman said. “They want something they can overpower easily. It will be rare when they find a dog or cat to be suitable prey.”

A mystery at Westdale Hills

One of few complaints against a bobcat during the study’s capture phase sent Golla and Broman to Westdale Hills, a hilly par-3 golf course that winds its way through an apartment community in Euless.

“He would lie next to the cart path, stroll around the fairways, cruise around like he owned the place,” Golla said. “He was so big that a couple of people were concerned about him; but he never caused any trouble. We caught him, put a GPS collar on him, turned him loose and tracked him from February to August before the collar malfunctioned.”

The collars, which also are data-collection devices, send a homing signal after they drop, so that the data can be added to the study. Golla found the malfunctioning collar in a creek. There was a bullet hole in it.

The fate of the Westdale Hills male remains a mystery.

“We don’t know if the bobcat was hit by a car [as was one female in the study group] and someone took the collar off, or if someone shot him,” Golla said. “Bobcats are not a protected species. We never saw that bobcat again.”

‘We have some beautiful bobcats’

Bobcats never generate complaints from Texas Star’s golfers, said Glenda Hartsell-Shelton, the general manager.

“There’s never been an incident, and no one has asked to get rid of them,” Hartsell-Shelton said. “People think it’s cool that they’re out there. There aren’t many places you can go and be 20 feet from a bobcat.”

And people like Jolley think it’s fantastic seeing and sharing stories about them.

“I was sitting in a golf cart at No. 6 green when the tallest bobcat I’ve seen sauntered by me so close and so slowly I could have reached out and touched it,” Jolley said.

Golfers and staff at Waterchase enjoy similar urban-wildlife relationships, said Alison Wise, the club’s food and beverage manager.

“We have some beautiful bobcats,” Wise said. “I know we’ve seen at least two separate ones in the last year, because one’s bigger than the other.”

Keeping track of critters

Texas keeps tabs on such public observations at iNaturalist.org, Broman said.

It’s a website “where the public contributes to conservation and research,” Broman said. “TPWD uses it to collect and manage public observation of plants and animals, because that’s a very important data resource.”

The public responded with more than 270 bobcat observations on iNaturalist.org in the last 2 1/2 years, Broman said.

“That’s a tiny percent of the actual sightings, because so few people know about the website,” Broman said.

There have been a handful of rare wildlife sightings, Broman said.

“River otters have been seen southeast of Dallas in the Great Trinity Forest, up by Lake Lewisville and up near Lake Lavon,” Broman said. “Mink were reported in southeast Dallas, central Grand Prairie and down by Lake Benbrook.”

Such encounters “have huge implications, because these critters are indicators of good water quality,” Broman said. “As much as we bash the Trinity [River] it appears it’s healthy enough to support these carnivores. It’s fantastic that the public is seeing these things.”

This story was originally published July 12, 2015 at 3:18 PM with the headline "Bobcats are par for the (golf) course in North Texas."