Desert Carnage
August 31st, 2006 by Rick Wright
I stepped out of the house this morning to a bloody mess on the front porch: the hindquarters and tail of a packrat, with the front of the skull and a neat packet of guts a few inches away. I don’t want to alarm the UPS man, so I scooped it all into the yard for the thrashers and hope that the stain is taken care of by the sun and the ants.
But who was the perpetrator? A Great Horned Owl would have taken the whole animal, or at most left the head; the same, I would think, for a bobcat or a coyote.
Any ideas?
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Hi Rick:
Nice blog, I’ll definitely have to pick up the new reptile guide. As for the mess on your porch, I believe bobcats do not eat the guts of their prey, unlike coyotes, which eat just about everything. Therefore, it could well be a bobcat, or perhaps an outdoor housecat.
Philip Kline
I have seen house cats leave this kind of mess. Not my cat!!!, but the cats of “others-not-to-be-named”.
Darlene