Thread: What moves at Night

My neighbor posted this picture on her Facebook page and I copied it for posting to show others.

I don't know who's foot/shoe this is. It could be hers or one of her kids. It's a cat print in the sand/mud. They were building a new deck on the back of the house and found this foot print around the deck area in the soft ground. It's definitely a cat print and not a dog print.

This is on the outskirts of Evansville, IN.

Now some history of this area. When I was younger I use to walk about a mile into the woods down this old gravel road to my friends house. My friends father worked for the Post Office back then. This was in the late 1950's or early 1960's. Now the father would tell us stories about seeing a black panther outside in their yard. They lived in a wooden log cabin on a 6 acre lake. Now I would at times have to walk home in the dark down that long gravel road until I made it out of the woods into a more open area with a paved road. I never did like walking around the woods at night.

Now skip forward to the 2016 or so. A local newspaper ran an article about a sports writer walking along a trail and finding cougar foot prints in the mud near a creek which cross the human walking trail. This trail goes from the University of Southern Indiana to Burdett Park out in the county outside the city limits. The sports writer also claimed in the newspaper article that a source of his had seen a cougar in the woods just to the SW of USI.

Now we all know that Bobcats are back in Indiana these days. Too many photos have been taken of Bob Cats with trail camera traps these days.

Oh. One more thing. The people that lived in the house just to the East of my house had a rabbit cage that was about 2 ft up off the ground. The house was made of wood and there was a heavy duty wire cage across the front of the rabbit house to keep the rabbits in. One morning there was a fuss and we found that the wire on the front of the cage had been ripped off and all the rabbits were dead. There was blood in the area and rabbit fur as well. We all speculated as to what may have killed the rabbits and torn the wire off the front of the cage. This was not just chicken wire as it was a heavier gage wire that was stapled onto the wood on the front of the cage and the cage door.

Now after seeing this picture of the paw print in the mud around the house next door I refuse to go out at night anymore.