RUTLAND COUNTY, Vt. (WCAX) – It’s not very often that someone would encounter a big cat while out doing errands, but what one Rutland County man saw this weekend, he won’t soon forget, and he got it on video.
Vermonter Gary Shattuck was driving down a rural road on Saturday when he came across a surprising feline. He got his camera and started filming the big cat.
Shattuck thought what he was filming was a Canada lynx, a cat rarely seen in Vermont. When Vermont Furbearer Biologist Brehan Furfey saw the video, she was sure.
“That’s an incredibly rare opportunity,” Furfey said. “It might be their only opportunity in their entire life. Like, how many people in this world has been able to say that I drove up to a Lynx and I was able to record it?”
I joined Furfey Monday as she investigated the sighting.
“What I’m looking for right now is probably some sign of lynx activity,” Furfey said.
She says the cat is likely a juvenile male and was walking along the tree line looking for food.
“They’ll quietly go along the side and they’ll look for prey resources or just hear them and they can easily jump quite a distance to get that animal, so it’s a very sneaky way of sneaking up on their prey,” Furfey said.
The lynx are prevalent in Canada where their food of choice, snowshoe hares, are abundant.
The last confirmed sighting of a Canada lynx in Vermont was in 2018 in Jericho. It’s even more rare for them to travel down to southern Vermont.
Fish and Wildlife says there’s no reason to fear the cats, but people should give them space to hunt.
“I strongly encourage people to give their distance if they do see it and just a reminder to be respectful of the animal,” Furfey said.
Fish and Wildlife receive around 100-200 reports of potential lynx every couple of years, but the majority turn out to be bobcats, which have a well-established population in Vermont.
Lynx have higher hindquarters, very large paws and more muted colors.
With bobcats and lynx looking very similar, Fish and Wildlife says they still want people to make the reports if think it might be a lynx because it’s important to be able to track them statewide.