DEM Furbearer Biologist Laken Ganoe expects this lesson is in Rhode Island’ s future and hopes to initiate a bear tracking study to better understand if and how bears are establishing a population in our state.
“ We’ re having bears come in from Connecticut and Massachusetts, where they have really thriving populations, and they’ re starting to disperse down into our state, so we are likely to get more sightings in the next few years here,” she says.
While many humans may not be interested in a close encounter with a predator, these sightings nevertheless seem to delight us.
The antics of a bobcat and her three kits tickled Carla Davis, a small business owner and alpaca farmer in South Kingstown, just before Christmas. From her back deck overlooking an old cranberry bog, she spied the family silhouetted against the dun-colored brambles, sauntering over the ice.
“ We’ ve seen bobcats on the property over the years, many times. But I’ ve never seen three babies frolicking around, acting like kittens and having a wonderful time. When the mother came out, one of them fell through the ice. She stood there and made sure it could get out before she herded them all over to the side.”
In its first two months, the Bobcat Project was flooded with more than 830 citizen science reports from all over Rhode Island. Elise Torello’ s YouTube channel of woodland creatures passing through her untamed backyard has attracted thousands of views. She started in late 2015 with one inexpensive camera that morphed into six, all recording wildlife within about a quarter mile of her South Kingstown house, fortuitously situated near two freshwater ponds separated by a narrow strip of land. The videos have featured great horned owls, coyotes, red foxes, fishers, river otters, bobcats and a bear once in June 2024.
“ If we want to have these amazing creatures around us, we have to have the open space, the healthy habitat, the clean water and the clean air for them to continue to survive around us, because I think their resilience is really inspirational when people are feeling kind of overwhelmed,” she says.
The Bobcat Project’ s goal is to trap and collar thirty animals this winter and next, collecting tracking data through
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