Some how I missed this on Christmas eve. 2011. Thanks to TrophyHusband for bringing it forward. TrophyHusband, you must be reading the greatest book ever written on bobcat hunting: the bobcat hunting section of BGH. that is awsome.
I like this video because it is a good object lesson for anyone going to a snow area where bobcats don't tree very often. For cat track they tree about 50%. But I know of a pocket of the same state where they tree 0% of the time, and there may be pockets where they tree more than 50% of the time but I have never experienced that in MN. The areas that were closest to us were about 30% that would climb.
These are good dogs for this area if you ever want to get a cat for someone that wants to shoot it, like a paying client. No one is trying to bite the cat, or tackle & pin it, and if there was just one dog doing this, the cat would be dead before anyone could get there.
All of these dogs are "headers". They all are in front of the cat. It is less likely that the cat would have lunged forward if he was being held from behind by one dog that would stay back. I have seen when a cat being held this way keeps slipping out the back door, and the bay will move, or it can even go back to a moving cat with dogs trailing. There is something about this situation that has prevented that from happening. It could be just one dog that is gifted at handling that situation, or the cat is just too tired to try it.
The cat may have tried it, and that one dog was so quick at putting a bite on his butt that he just knows better than to try it again. Or maybe Cat Track has gotten rid of his culls like we used to hunt.
I just dont know.
If there is one dog gifted at preventing this, my guess is the walker colored dog in fixed position on the right. Doesn't that dog just look like she's tight and quick and got her feet in the starting blocks for the 100 yard dash, ready for the starting gun?
It is impossible for me to know how long it took the hunters to get there, but my guess is, that they were able to get there fairly quickly, so the cat did not have time to build up wind and courage to try moving out the back door.
I see four dogs, which is one or two more than we found the most success with in the snow, but there is not much snow. Sometimes a hunter will release one or two young ones into the bay when they leave the truck to walk in. I have seen cats caught in significant snow with as many as 7 dogs, but it was rare in our experience. If we were super serious about catching one, it was 2 dogs. A close, tight header that would not bite (without another biter present) [exactly like the blue dog on the left. He is perfect for that. The only improvement for him might be if he did not lean forward with each bark. The cat could relax more if he did not.], and a "healer" so to speak, guarding the back door, who would not get too close, and would not bite.
At times we would release young dogs to come in to the bay, but that sometimes resulted in a lost cat or a dead cat. In this video you are looking at a balancing act, believe it or not. Everything is just right some how. And when everything is just right, you can rack up the numbers of successful hunts . And you start to feel like this might as well be coon hunting. Then something changes, and it is back to bobcat hunting as usual.
I never have made video. But I sure see the value of it. I know when I played football in high school they filmed our games with super 8 movie cameras, and the coaches would watch the films and analyze everything, and then the team would watch them at least once, and it would be stopped and discussed at key points, etc.
It is just great watching these videos like this one and the cold track videos, because you really can learn so much, and you can pay attention to details of things that you might have missed during the actual "game day".
It is really interesting to see the bobcat become nervous, and he told us ahead of time that he was about to do something. And then it makes me want to know why? It seems like it was the movement of the two dogs that were staying back but moving. I like the two front dogs because they are fixed. I have seen it often when we had the one dog like the blue dog, and one dog who remained in fixed position at the back door, the scene actually becomes trance-like. No one moves. The cat becomes comfortable and even seems restful. And they stay that way indefinitely, until the hunter decides to make a change.
I am sure all this sounds crazy to people who's hunt is basically over when the dogs bark "treed" in the areas where cats usually climb and stay hooked. In these bay situations everything is only a moment away from being anything but over. Where as you look for the ultimate locating tree dog, we look for the ultimate bay team; A bay team that can also locate a cat shaped popsicle on the end of a stick sometimes if it is called for.
Where as in some areas a bobcat will climb a tree up ahead of the dogs and not in their sight, these cats will not stop out ahead of the dogs. This cat was forced to stop. With our culls, there was one dog that was usually responsible for forcing the cat to stop. It sounds like Cat Track walks with his dogs, so I bet he knows which one is really responsible for it. But some times road hunters like their loudest dog the best. Sometimes credit goes to the wrong dog, until they remove the responsible dog and the catch rate goes way down. (But I bet the Garmin has changed all that and will lead to more educated choices in breeding.) The one responsible for the stop is vital out here, and she may not even be one of the two up front on the bay job, and most likely not the loudest.
It is really awesome of Cat track to share the video. If you are still around Cat track, thank you!
