A bobcat's home range is not a fixed shape on a map. It breathes with the weather. When researchers tracked desert bobcats through a hot season, one female's range contracted from about 20.2 square kilometers in the cool months to 11.9 once the daytime heat reached roughly 33 degrees Celsius. The cat did not move to richer country. It made its country smaller, because in that heat every extra kilometer walked costs water it cannot spare.
The animal itself is a house cat scaled up two or three times, with a spotted and barred coat, tufted ears, and the short bobbed tail that names it. Read that tail to identify it: black on the top side only, pale underneath. Almost everything else about the cat is built to go unseen.
For its size it kills well above its weight. Most of what it eats is rabbits and rodents, but nothing from a mouse to an adult deer is entirely off the menu, taken with a bite to the throat. It hunts mostly at the cool edges of the day, heaviest in the hours after dark and again before mid-morning, and lies up through the worst of the midday sun. When it makes a kill too big to finish, it covers the carcass and comes back to it.
Range and habit put the bobcat squarely on this ground; it ranks among the desert's common cats, even if you will almost never see one. It rarely troubles people. Small pets and backyard poultry are another matter, and genuinely at risk from a cat this capable, so the honest note is caution, not alarm. We have not confirmed one on the parcel. Of the desert's predators, it is among the likeliest to be crossing it already, in the dark.
That elastic range is the whole strategy. Across studies a bobcat's territory runs from roughly a single square kilometer for a settled female to something many times larger for a roaming male, sized to whatever the season and the prey will support. In this desert its droppings run heavily to rodents, with rabbits and birds behind them, a generalist eating down whatever the ground is currently producing.
Learn the tail. Black only on top, and short, on a cat that has already decided you will not see the rest of it.