Old Bailey, the bobcat

This is a story about latent instinct and second chances.  It begins in the days of my youth when it was still a rare event to see a flock of wild turkeys in eastern New York, or for that matter anywhere in New England. It was before some of the shabby, sleepy farm towns of northern Dutchess County became desirable for second homes and cyber cafes.

The central landscape of my childhood home was the 600 acres of Millbrook School where my father was headmaster. There were swamps to romp in, streams to dam, and forested hills of craggy shale to explore. There was also a zoo.

Millbrook’s Trevor Zoo is not one of those sad animal prisons where creatures languish with dull eyes and blunted senses, but rather a fully accredited zoo involved in everything from rare species conservation to engaging students in animal care.  It is a regional gem and well worth a visit.  In the early 1980s, though, before an infusion of generous philanthropic support, there were parts of the zoo that were less modern, where cages were smaller. This story is about one of the animals who lived in those cages.

There was once a bobcat named Bailey, who came to Millbrook after decades of captivity at the Bronx Zoo. He had never been in the wild, never caught the scent of prey on the wind or known the quivering pause before springing to the kill. He was old, and tired, and no longer deemed suitable for display in New York, so he arrived at Millbrook to live out his final geriatric days. I remember him hissing on top of the wooden box where he bedded down at night, and thinking there was still something feral in that old captive body.

Then one night, Bailey got out.

Perhaps his student keeper left the gate unlatched. In any event, the school night watchman found Bailey outside the cage and managed to coax him back inside with a plate of food. But not long afterward he was loose again, and this time he was gone for good.

Gone from the zoo compound, certainly, but not from the area as it turned out, for Bailey started showing up at the Dumpster behind the dining hall. The zoo staff set a large Havahart trap for him that managed to catch one of the neighborhood dogs instead. We feared it would end in tragedy, that he would not be able to find food for himself, or worse: that he would raid someone’s chicken coop and end up getting shot.

But Bailey survived. And he thrived.

I saw him one night, about six months after his escape, crossing the road down by the school wetlands. He was sleek and well fed and there weren’t other bobcats in the region back then so it could only have been Bailey. Others saw him high on the ridge, far from the derelict dairy farms fast converting to horse country.  He was 30 years old. He knew what to do. He was free at last.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.