Bobcat Alley

The orphaned bobcat kitten was in critical condition when Nancy Warner rescued her from a garage in September 2022. “She was in really rough shape,” remembers Warner: just four weeks old, weighing under a pound, severely malnourished, riddled with fleas and laboring to breathe with a chest infection.

Warner whisked the kitten back to The Last Resort Wildlife Refuge, a nonprofit she’d founded in Hewitt, New Jersey, and placed her into an incubator. The kitten needed warmth and oxygen. Warner inserted an IV, giving her fluids, antibiotics and pain meds. That first weekend, the cat slipped into respiratory arrest twice, but Warner was able to resuscitate her. Within a few days, the kitten was sipping formula from a syringe. Warner named her Victory.

Exactly where she came from remains a mystery. A nursing female bobcat was found dead nearby—hit by a vehicle. Gretchen Fowles, a wildlife biologist with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), sent a sample of the mom’s DNA to a lab to see if the two bobcats were related. They weren’t. This adult had died trying to navigate a fractured habitat, cut by roadways and a steady stream of cars—one of the greatest threats bobcats face.

These shy, elusive predators—about twice as big as a house cat, with a distinctive stumpy tail and tufted ears—are native to most of North America, including New Jersey. Fossil records show that they roamed the northeast United States as early as 16,000 years ago, and were still plentiful in New Jersey until the modern era.

The Lynx rufus population began to decline in the Northeast after the arrival of European settlers in the 1600s who trapped them for the international fur market. As the human population grew, farms, towns and cities severed previously unbroken habitat, and at the turn of the 20th century, massive deforestation for lumber and fuel left bobcats without room to roam, hide and hunt. Numbers dwindled, and in the early 1970s bobcats essentially vanished from the Garden State.

Gretchen Fowles and her colleagues at the state’s Endangered & Nongame Species Program (ENSP) have studied New Jersey’s bobcats for more than 20 years. It’s not an easy task: Though these felines may live in areas close to humans, they prefer to avoid people. Starting in 2002, state biologists began capturing and outfitting the cats with satellite (and, later, GPS) collars to track their movements. Trail cams—motion-triggered wildlife cameras—are another important monitoring tool.

Then, to estimate their population size, the program partnered with Working Dogs for Conservation and added a wildlife-detection dog to the team—first Bear (a Labrador retriever-chow chow) and now, Fly (a cattle dog mix). These dogs were specially trained to detect the presence of bobcats.

Fowles recently took Fly to a cement culvert that runs beneath Interstate 287. It was built for water runoff, but a local researcher, Melissa McCutcheon, documented bobcats moving through. Nose to the ground, the dog energetically sniffed the area, and then abruptly laid down. She’d found bobcat scat and was overjoyed with her simple reward: a ball that she was obsessed with.

With canine help, ENSP has collected more that 500 scats, and the team also obtains fur and tissue samples from collared cats and road victims. Processed in the lab, DNA from these samples identifies individual animals. The state’s ever-growing database provides insight into the size and density of the population, a map of where cats are and their “genetic connectivity”—or levels of inbreeding—that informs management decisions.

In 2014, to help the cats and other wildlife, TNC launched a conservation initiative called “Bobcat Alley.” The vision initially set out to preserve and link a 50-square-mile corridor connecting two Appalachian Mountain ridgelines: the Kittatinny and the Highlands. Now, over a decade later, the project area has expanded to 156 square miles—an effort to connect protected landscapes in Pennsylvania, New York’s Hudson River Valley and Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains.

Olsen calls Bobcat Alley “a conservation intervention,” spearheaded by TNC but involving many partners. The NJDEP, for example, is six years into a comprehensive program called Connecting Habitat Across New Jersey (CHANJ), which engages many organizations, including TNC, in making the state’s landscapes more accessible for wildlife. Using extensive data, the state maps broad, intact habitat cores and potential corridors that need protection or restoration. The goal is to link them.

TNC zooms in closer, scientifically prioritizing specific land tracts for protection based on their potential for resilience and connectivity. TNC works with local communities and other partners to acquire them. Thus far, TNC has secured 2,300 acres—including its Johnsonburg Swamp and Blair Creek preserves, both open to the public—and has plans to protect a full 10,000 acres by 2030.

CHANJ also works to pinpoint stretches of road that are collision hot spots, Fowles says. In those places, CHANJ—along with county or city agencies—works to construct wildlife underpasses or overpasses to create safe crossings for wildlife. The program echoes efforts to preserve wilderness for other cats, including Florida panthers in quickly developing areas south of Orlando, mountain lions in Southern California and ocelots in Texas.

Conserving land for bobcats benefits an entire ecosystem, Olsen says. “If we protect enough [field and forest] habitat for the movements of bobcats, we can protect all the other species that require smaller home ranges within similar habitat.” At least 127 terrestrial wildlife species could benefit from the Bobcat Alley and CHANJ initiatives, from black bears, porcupines and red foxes to wood turtles, timber rattlesnakes and Jefferson salamanders.

Northwestern New Jersey is also a migratory pinch point within a crucial wildlife thoroughfare—the Appalachian Mountains—which run northward from Alabama to the Canadian Maritimes. Animals reach a fork in Bobcat Alley where they can continue northward into New York state, New England and Canada. This route is expected to become even more important as the planet warms, with more frequent extreme weather events and amplified damage. Research conducted by the University of Washington and TNC has shown that the Appalachians will be a critical natural passage for species moving north into cooler latitudes and higher elevations. To adapt, some plants and animals are already shifting their ranges, increasing the urgency of protection—especially at connectivity points. “What we do in New Jersey is critical” for the continent, says Eliot Nagele, TNC’s New Jersey director of lands.

The good news is that in some ways, New Jersey is ahead of the game. After decades of conservation, 33% of its land has been preserved by the state and local governments and conservation organizations. Connecting these parcels through targeted land protection and roadway crossing enhancements is the next step.

New Jersey built two of the nation’s first wildlife crossings back in the 1980s, shortly after the newly completed Interstate 78 sliced through the 2,000-acre Watchung Reserve: Two wildlife bridges reconnected forest isolated by the new highway. Then, in 2015, NJDEP developed under-the-road solutions, dubbed “critter tunnels,” that use tall roadside fencing to guide animals to safe underpasses.

Ecological connectivity has become a nationwide movement. At least 20 states have ratified their own connectivity policies, with legislation introduced in at least eight more. In some places—like New England and the West—states have signed regional agreements to coordinate efforts to reconnect wildlife corridors. Protecting land and building wildlife crossings across roadways are an essential part of the process.

In June, New Jersey passed its own Wildlife Corridor Bill. The bill—the first of its kind in the state—appropriates funding to assess how proposed roads impact wildlife. It also directs the NJDEP and Department of Transportation to collaborate closely, identifying key corridors and collision hot spots, prioritizing crossing projects and improving safety for both motorists and wildlife. 

It has the potential to be a crucial step in statewide connectivity efforts. Conservation needs a trifecta, says Barbara Brummer, TNC’s New Jersey state director, who coined the memorable Bobcat Alley name: “policy action, strategic and timely land conservation, and improved crossings where there is high animal mortality from car strikes.”

Eric Olsen and Gretchen Fowles emphasize that careful, science-based strategy is key. “We need to figure out the most critical parcels within the corridor puzzle, and figure out how we protect them,” Fowles says. Nearly 50 years after bobcats’ unlikely comeback, she is cautiously optimistic that securing, restoring and stringing the most critical lands together will provide the cats with safe passage and speed their recovery.

In May 2023, some nine months after she rescued Victory, Warner walked through lush woods to a partially shrouded enclosure. She was greeted by vehement hisses. After early critical care, Warner had raised Victory with minimal human contact—while slowly teaching her to hunt—so she might return to the wild. It’s a tough line to walk, Warner says, “providing enough care and kindness that [animals] trust you, but not so much that they imprint on you in a way that you can’t release them going forward.” But Warner successfully navigated that tightrope.

Under Fowles’ supervision, Warner coaxed Victory into a travel crate, loaded her onto an ATV, and drove her deep into a forest in the New Jersey Highlands. When Warner opened the cage door, the cat was a blur, gone within seconds.

In early 2025, Victory was caught on camera by a trail cam, looking healthy and beautiful—living proof of the wild nature persisting in New Jersey.