COLUMBUS (WCMH) — Once thought to be extinct in Ohio, bobcats are slowly making a return to southern and eastern portions of the state.

Shauna, Weyrauch, a wildlife biologist who teaches at The Ohio State University-Newark, has been observing the distribution and behaviors of a male and female bobcat and several kittens on a trail camera in rural eastern Ohio since 2015.

“I’m interested in what habitat characteristics are associated with bobcats, and how to potentially improve habitat for this ecologically important carnivore,” said Weyrauch, commenting that restoring the bobcat population in central Ohio is limited by available den sites in forested areas.

“Because of our history of clearing forests, the large old hollow logs that once likely served as important denning habitat are scarce,” Weyrauch said that four structures were built in 2022 that could potentially provide dens, which are monitored with trail cameras.

Conservation efforts have led to a gradual return of small numbers of bobcats in the parts of the Midwest, Ohio Valley and Northeast.

Bobcats, along with cougars and wolves, were extirpated from Ohio by the mid-1800s due to hunting and trapping, and the loss of protected habitats as forests were cleared for logging and agriculture. A few began to return in the 1960s and 1970s, likely from the rugged Appalachian highlands southeast of Ohio.

In 1974, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources listed the bobcat as an endangered species to protect the isolated populations. As numbers increased in recent years, the bobcat was taken off Ohio’s threatened and endangered species list in 2014, according to ODNR Division of Wildlife, but is protected against hunting and trapping.

Researchers point to the difficulty in confirming precise numbers of bobcats, which is why trail cameras have been installed in the foothills of the Appalachians, as part of Project Wild Coshocton.