T
racking Bobcats on Kiawah Island
A personal look at 14 years of bobcat research
by Jim Jordan
I first set foot on Kiawah Island in September
1996, fresh out of college and pursuing a Master of
Science degree through the University of Georgia (UGA).
Even though I grew up only two and a half hours up the
interstate in Columbia, I had never visited Kiawah. My
first few days here were eye-opening to say the least.
We walked and drove the Island for several days and
nights and saw deer, raccoons, foxes and even a bobcat.
Growing up in a family of avid outdoorsmen, these types
of sightings were not unusual for me when I was out in
the woods, but I was amazed to find these same animals
literally living in people’s backyards.
My first hands-on experiences with capturing
and tracking bobcats began in 2000, when the Town of
Kiawah Island (TOKI) and UGA initiated our first bobcat
telemetry study. J.C. Griffin, a UGA graduate student, and
I learned a lot about trapping bobcats that winter and were
able to capture and radiocollar 14 different bobcats. We
replicated the 2000 study in 2004 with the help of a new
graduate student, Shane Roberts, and were able to capture
and collar 16 bobcats that year.
In each of these first two studies, we relied
on VHF (very high frequency) triangulation to locate
individual cats three to four times per week. VHF
triangulation is very labor intensive, and it often takes 30
minutes or more to obtain a single estimated location for
one bobcat. Each of the first two studies involved tracking
animals for one full year, and we were typically able to
obtain approximately 155 locations per bobcat during that
time.
In late 2006, I approached the Kiawah
Conservancy about funding for a pilot project to
investigate the feasibility of using GPS (global positioning
system) collars to more intensively track bobcats on the
Island. Though GPS technology has been around for
many years, collar companies had only just begun to
design collars small enoug