Bobcat Rescue: Two Kansas Linemen Rescue Frozen-Down Mother Cat, Kitten

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When we’re dealing with unseasonable winter weather, like most of the nation is today, we tend to focus on our own needs. We make sure our cars and trucks have good tires, that we aren’t going out on the roads unless necessary, that we dress for the weather, and so on. That’s as it should be — but at times, we forget that the wildlife that shares our living space can suffer in bad weather, too.

Case in point: On Sunday, while helping to clean up power lines and restore electricity to the area around Norton, Kansas, some power company workers came upon a surprise. The linemen, neither of whom was Glen Campbell, found a mother bobcat and her kitten frozen to the top of a power pole.

A lineman and his crew were in for a surprise on Sunday, aside from the severe winter weather that hit the state.

JaLynn Colip Urban says her husband, Dominic Urban, works as a lineman in Norton and was faced with an unusual challenge on Sunday.

Urban, working alongside Eric Hartwell, were working on restoring power to Kansans impacted by the weekend’s winter storm, when the two were given a new task: Two bobcats needed rescuing from a nearby power pole, and they were frozen stuck.

The high temperature in Norton on Sunday was a freezing 16 degrees, with a wind chill of -5°F.

“I couldn’t knock them off,” Urban said. “She (the mother) was froze down to the top of the pole so I had to make a snare out of a piece of pipe and some rope hold her down while I beat the ice loose that lowered her down to the ground. I had to do the same with the kitten.”

The whole rescue took about two hours.

The effort included shutting off power to that section of the line, as well, which took longer than the actual rescue. But it wouldn’t have done at all to have come out of the exercise with a barbecued bobcat — or lineman.

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The bobcat (Lynx rufus) is a wide-ranging, adaptable critter. They are found almost everywhere in the lower 48 and, like some other species, do rather well around human settlements. But life isn’t easy for any predator. The number of young predators in general that die in their first year is shocking; in more northern latitudes, with harsh winter weather to contend with, less than half of young predators live through their first year.

So, in this case, it’s good that these two Kansas linemen were able to help this mother bobcat and her kitten.

This seems appropriate.

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