Alright, I listened to the screams and it is either a bobcat or Mountain lion. I never see them in the area and we don't catch them on trail cams but I do have a story of something that could have been a bobcat that came in and killed some rabbits and I do have a even worse second hand story of how the Department of fish and game deals with mountain lions around here...
Rabbit story:
So I have some rabbits in a sectioned off part of the chicken coop, sometimes they escape and if you get around to catching them quickly when they are still only comfortable around the coop then it is pretty easy to get them back in but if you wait until they have settled in with the area then you can chase them for hours and not catch them. Well one year a ton of baby rabbits escaped and I could not catch them all, by the time winter came around there was about 5 rabbits left. Winter moved along slowly and it was a pretty bad one, it got really cold and there was lots of snow on the ground, the 5 rabbits were still doing fine and I was surprised, usually escaped rabbits get picked off pretty fast if I can't catch them. I found coyote tracks chasing rabbit tracks pretty often and the rabbits always out ran the coyotes in the deep snow, the rabbit tracks were up on top of the snow and the coyote tracks sunk down deep into it so the rabbits had the advantage. It was such a bad winter that all the predators came in to hunt the rabbits because they had caught every easy thing to catch out in the woods, I started coming across these chase tracks more often and really close to the chicken coop and the house, usually it was coyote tracks or fox tracks. One morning when I woke up I saw no rabbits around the house, I saw massive paw prints ON TOP of the snow, chasing the rabbit tracks, and I never saw the rabbits again. Some predator came in and did what a ton of coyotes couldn't do all winter in one night. After the attack I saw the same tracks wandering around in the barn yard and by the coop for weeks after the rabbits were killed, I found tracks circling the coop and the dog kennel and eventually it stopped and I have not seen tracks like that since. There has been Mountain lion sightings in my county multiple times, one in 2008 was actually in the neighboring city.
Second hand story of how helpful the Wisconsin DNR can be:
I have been told this story twice, once from my dad and once from his friend. The story was told to them by a cattle farmer in a neighboring county, the farmer was having some trouble with a animal coming in at night and killing his cattle, he saw the tracks in the dirt and the claw marks on the dead bull and was convinced it was a mountain lion, he tried to capture it with a trail cam but could not, he saw more tracks and more of his animals were killed. The farmer called the DNR for help and they came to investigate, they said the tracks were smudged and they could not tell what it was, then they left after assuring him there was no Mountain lions around here. A few days later the farmer came across another kill with the mountain lion still on it! He called the DNR and they came, he frantically explained what had happened to them and he showed them the tracks and the kill and they said, those are not mountain lion tracks and that is not a mountain lion kill. The farmer was extremely mad that they were denying it and he pulled one officer aside and was talking to him, he told the officer that whatever it was it was going to be shot by him the next time it killed one of his cows, the DNR officer got angry and ADMITTED to it being a mountain lion, he told the farmer that they were trying to reintroduce some large predators to the ranges they used to live in and he also told him that he was not going to be killing any mountain lion and if he did he would be taken to jail. The DNR left and there was no more kills. The man only told a few of his friends about what happened and surprisingly it was never put in the news like all the other sightings of mountain lions or even just their tracks. I am not sure when this happened or exactly where it happened but the story was brought up because a Timber wolf had come onto our property, we heard it howling to our dogs at night and we found tracks out in the woods, it was probably attracted to us because we have so many dogs that are constantly howling back to anything that sounds like a howl and there is a lot of dogs going into heat throughout the year. Well anyways, my dad blamed the DNR for introducing the predator back onto our land and was not to happy for the next year as he sat and listened to the wolf howling to our dogs from the edges of the forest.
The DNR does love the blue heron colony on our property and say it could be one of the biggest in the area, they were really happy to hear about it because they have spent years trying to help the blue heron population in the area and now they have a colony that is producing 40+ new herons each year. I will do something about it if it continues, I do not want my dogs to be killed by a big cat, even a bobcat can do some serious damage to a dog and mountain lions have been caught on security cameras killing dogs. I will have to be carefull and I will try to catch the animal on a trail cam.
