Is there any better feeling as a hunter than taking down an animal that you’ve been tracking?
The thrill of the hunt is something that gets outdoorsmen (and women) hooked for a lifetime, and this Arkansas man certainly loves the outdoors. Christopher Thurman loves nothing more than being out in nature, and hunting is huge part of that.
So when he recently got to experience a hunt of a lifetime, he was incredibly grateful. It’s not everyday that a hunter gets to bag a rare, never-seen-before (at least in Arkansas) albino bobcat.
Thurman told Field & Stream that he had tracked the unique wild cat for a long time. In fact, he had been keeping an eye on it using trail cams set up along his property ever since the all-white cat was a kitten.
After hearing from a neighbor that had spotted the bobcat towards the end of deer season, the Arkansas hunter decided that it was finally time to claim the wild cat for himself.
Thurman figured that the bobcat would have never made it to adulthood since it stuck out like a sore thumb in the wild with its all white coat. When it came time to set up for his hunt, he knew that the bobcat’s appearance would help him spot it from his stand.
Using a rabbit distress call, Thurman was able to draw in a bobcat shortly after he got set up in his hunting spot. The only problem was that it wasn’t the one he was hoping for. However, thanks to Arkansas’ bobcat season stipulations, a hunter can tag two wild cats a day.
So, the young Arkansas hunter took the first one down, then got his predator call back up and running, and as he told Field & Stream, it wasn’t long after that the bobcat he had been looking for revealed itself:
“Within a minute he popped out of the thicket. He crept up and started stalking the call, like they do, then he sat down behind a tree. That’s when I shot him.
I saw that it had the pink eyes and the pink nose and then I saw those blonde spots. It was an amazing hunt, and getting two in one day made it even better.”
How about that for a successful hunt?
Two in one day is pretty special on its own, but when you throw in the fact that one of the wild cats was an actual albino bobcat, that makes it even better.
And as I stated earlier, it could be the very first albino bobcat ever recorded in Arkansas. Thurman talked to a couple of people about his kill, and everyone seems to agree that tagging it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity:
“I have talked to my local biologist, and it’s the only one ever documented in Arkansas. Nobody I’ve talked to has ever seen one.”
You can view pictures from the hunt in Christopher Thurman’s Facebook post about the bobcats below:
