Carson Bender, of Wisconsin Rapids, was calling turkeys into shotgun range just after dawn on April 17. The experienced, 19-year-old hunter was working gobblers and sitting with his back against a large tree. He was overlooking a pasture on private land near the town of Nekoosa in central Wisconsin.
Bender was in full camouflage, including a face mask with only a small slit for his eyes to see through camo cloth. He was watching several gobblers working toward him with his 20-gauge shotgun up and ready to shoot. Then he heard faint rustling in the leaves behind him. He couldn’t turn his head to see what was there. So, he slowly raised his cell phone camera to look behind the tree.
To his astonishment, there was a mature bobcat within arm’s reach. He carefully switched on his camera and recorded the ever-so-stealthy approach of the bobcat, which stood frozen like a taxidermy mount.
Only an occasional tail twitch and soft step of the bobcat showed the animal was alive, and it was in full stalking mode as it eased toward Bender. He’d been calling like a hen turkey while the cat was planning its breakfast.
While the video plays and the cat closes in on Bender ever-so-slowly, hen turkeys in the nearby pasture can be heard yelping and purring. The cat’s eyes are locked onto the spot where it thought Bender was a live turkey. Just over one minute into the video, the feline leaps onto the hunter, scratching his left arm.
Read Next: ‘I Felt Like I’d Been Body-Slammed by an NFL Linebacker.’ Idaho Turkey Hunter Shoots Charging Moose in Self-Defense
Bender moves as the bobcat comes down. The cat stops in astonishment, then turns and runs, as the camera phone falls, facing up to the tree tops. The video continues with hen turkeys still calling nearby.
“He was more perturbed than I was when he jumped on me and I shook him off,” Bender tells Outdoor Life. “It was about a 25-pound cat, and it scratched me through my camo shirt a couple times.”
The bobcat raced away, and Bender went back to calling turkeys. Before the hunt was over, he had a chance at a tom but missed the bird. He thinks he was so rattled from his brush with the bobcat that it took his aim off the gobbler he missed.
“I’ve shot other big turkeys, so I wasn’t too shaken by trying to take that gobbler,” says Bender, a mechanic who attends college classes. “The strutting tom I missed was only 30 yards away. But thinking about that bobcat didn’t help my aim.”
The bobcat scratches on Bender’s arm later were attended to by a doctor, who prescribed antibiotics.
“The scratches are ok now, no problem,” Bender says. “But you never know about infection, especially from a wild animal like a bobcat.”
Since the bobcat encounter, Bender has been back in the same woods turkey hunting. A few days later, he got another chance at a tom.
“I was hunting the same pasture area and shot a 22-pound gobbler with a double beard using my same 20-gauge and number 5 shot,” he said. “That bird was standing at 25 yards, a little closer than the one I missed after calling in the bobcat.”
Read the full article here
