Bobcat Hunts Mallards And Muskrat In Yellowstone National Park

Bobcat Yellowstone

Nature shows are top tier content and I will not allow a word otherwise.

Programs like Planet Earth and Our Planet exploded when released, getting so popular we even got what we never knew we needed, a Planet Earth narrated by Snoop Dogg. I mean come on, if that doesn’t prove how widespread they were I don’t know what does.

Well, it seems there’s another of these shows that I’ve somehow missed over the years, and if the rest are anything like this clip, boy do I have some catching up to do.

The Smithsonian Channel puts out a slew of engaging content through both their TV Channel and YouTube page, from aviation to ancient Egypt to the topic at hand, nature.

One of their shows focuses on Yellowstone, the iconic, 3,000+ square mile, first National Park in the world, created by the great Teddy Roosevelt in 1872.

Titled Epic Yellowstone, the show dives deep on various creatures from all over the vast landscape, capturing absolutely stunning images and videos that truly show off the immense beauty in both large scale landscapes and tiny, zoomed in details.

The video that first brought me into this world is titled “A Bobcat Uses a Different Hunting Strategy to Catch a Duck” and it immediately grabbed my interest.

It goes on to show a very unique bobcat who ventured out of his comfort zone, into the far north regions of the park that are covered in a foot of snow.

The narrator says bobcats rarely do this, but it seems this guy had gotten pretty hungry and was starting to take some risks in search of a meal.

The bobcat is drawn to the only non-frozen part of the land, a flowing river, in hopes that he can grab some of the birds and animals that will undoubtedly flock to it.

When he arrives, he’s very pleased to see a raft of ducks floating calmly in the water. He wastes no time approaching, perhaps even doing it brazenly, which may have played into the result. The ducks just kicked a bit farther into the water and away from the reach of the predator.

Seeming to learn from his mistake, the bobcat decides to take a different approach and hide in a carved out area of the river bed under a tree root, waiting for an unsuspecting creature to float past and into his striking range.

Almost right on queue, a muskrat starts swimming over to him, blissfully unaware of the danger lurking very nearby.

The bobcat adjusts his location for the perfect sneak attack, then sits and waits until just the right moment…

He leaps out from his hiding spot as the muskrat swims by and the calm water explodes into a frenzy of splashes, bites, and shakes.

When things slow down and the bobcat lifts its head out of the water, there’s no muskrat to be seen.

The mighty bobcat came up empty yet again, left to try another method to get a meal for the day, but now covered in freezing cold water while trudging through the snow.

Brutal, absolutely brutal.

Life is never easy in the wild, but it seems it’s even harder on this poor bobcat.

Better luck next time.

If you need me, I’ll be binge watching Epic Yellowstone

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