Southern Illinois Bobcats

In the article, “Bobcat”, the author describes bobcats and their distribution, etc. To begin with, he talks about the bobcat’s appearance: that it is double the size of a house cat, and its height can be 20-23 inches. Its length can be 30-35 inches and weight can be 10-40 pounds. Bobcats were distributed in Illinois when the first Europeans came here. Unfortunately, the bobcat began to decrease in the 1880s, and it was the first threatened species of Illinois’s list in 1977, because of its “Habitat changes and unregulated harvest”. Until the early 1990s, bobcat’s number was beginning to increase, and in 1998 bobcats were put away from the Illinois’s threatened species list in 1998. Its distributions are in the southern and northwestern Illinois. Bobcats like to live not only in forest land or wooded areas, but also close to humans. They are a kind of nocturnal animal. Male may need about 8 square miles of activities area, and female may need about 3 square miles. Because Illinois has better protections of bobcat from hunting, the there begin to increase the number of bobcats in the early 1990s. Currently most deaths are caused by car, and small cats are usually killed by “coyotes, domestic dogs, and owls”. Bobcats use their sharp visioning and hearing to catch their food. They usually eat “rabbits, squirrels, birds, and mice, etc. Their mating season is from January through June, and the mating peak is in February, one female can generate 1 to 6 babies, but usually 2 to 3 kittens. Finally, the author writes that protecting forests is most important for animals because it is the home of plants and animals. Appropriate cutting down of trees is good for wildlife because forests, animals, and plants need enough sun-light.
I learned from the article of Bobcat, which let me know about the bobcat and its condition. Illinois did a good job for bobcat because in the past, the bobcats were an endangered species in Illinois, but now they had been getting away from the endangered species list since 1998. According to the article, the author talks about how humans should cut down some trees to offer more sunlight to wildlife, but I don’t agree with the author’s idea, because a long time ago, when the humans never touched these forests, most wildlife could live well without human activities or cutting trees. I don’t know why human should cut down some trees in order to give more sunlight to forest’s animals and plants. So, I think that human should let the natural world makes its own ecosystem without human activities, because the natural world has its own rules.
Retrieved from Bobcat.
By Yen