Oct 6, 2026 · 23 min · 9 segments
Bob chats with Dr. Shauna Weyrauch. She leads a long-term camera study of Bobcats in eastern Ohio ("Project Wild Coshocton") and enjoys sharing her passion for wildlife conservation.
It's really exciting.
I was looking back into the history of the bobcat.
They're a native animal.
By what? Around the middle of the 1800s they were gone?
Habitat loss and overhunting and trapping, you know, did in not just bobcats, but pretty much all of our larger predators, mountain lions, wolves, bears.
Back in the day, it was about eliminating anything that could possibly be a threat to us.
All of these animals you mentioned really are very important to ecosystems.
In a natural state, be considered a more of a mesopredator or a mesocarnivore.
They usually would not be the apex predator, [laughs] but functionally now they are.
But being in this, uh, kind of medium size range and they're very adaptable, they're generalists, but they help control populations of things like rodents and rabbits, so very important in balancing our ecosystems out, helping to exert some of that top-down pressure.
So it's kind of an ecology term, but organisms at the top of the food chain suppress those at lower levels and, and then you have the bottom-up forces where the organisms at the bottom of the food chain promote those, have effects on those above them.
So a healthy ecosystem is a balance of these top-down and bottom-up effects.
And so bobcats are helping to restore some of those top-down effects in an ecosystem.
I mean-
... it's not unusual for people to tell me that they've seen a coyote, and I think people think that coyotes have always been here, but that's not-
It's really exciting.
I was looking back into the history of the bobcat.
They're a native animal.
By what? Around the middle of the 1800s they were gone?
Habitat loss and overhunting and trapping, you know, did in not just bobcats, but pretty much all of our larger predators, mountain lions, wolves, bears.
Back in the day, it was about eliminating anything that could possibly be a threat to us.
All of these animals you mentioned really are very important to ecosystems.
In a natural state, be considered a more of a mesopredator or a mesocarnivore.
They usually would not be the apex predator, [laughs] but functionally now they are.
But being in this, uh, kind of medium size range and they're very adaptable, they're generalists, but they help control populations of things like rodents and rabbits, so very important in balancing our ecosystems out, helping to exert some of that top-down pressure.
So it's kind of an ecology term, but organisms at the top of the food chain suppress those at lower levels and, and then you have the bottom-up forces where the organisms at the bottom of the food chain promote those, have effects on those above them.
So a healthy ecosystem is a balance of these top-down and bottom-up effects.
And so bobcats are helping to restore some of those top-down effects in an ecosystem.
I mean-
... it's not unusual for people to tell me that they've seen a coyote, and I think people think that coyotes have always been here, but that's not-
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