Chilliwack woman witnesses bobcat fend off cougar in tree

A Chilliwack woman is calling a wildlife encounter between a bobcat and a cougar a “life-altering moment.”

Tammy Jordan peered out her dining room window from her east Chilliwack home to see a large animal moving around at the top of a cedar tree on Feb. 16.

“(It was) so large that I made everyone look to try to figure what it was,” she says.

She had to grab binoculars to confirm that it was in fact a bobcat, a few hundred feet in the air, at the very top of the evergreen. Crows that were circling above were “not happy” and trying to get the cat to leave, she said.

After seeing the bobcat through the binoculars, she went out to her deck where she heard two cats growling.

“The very uncomfortable bobcat let out a terrible noise and out of the corner of the tree I see another cat, much larger, jump up swatting towards the bobcat.”

It wasn’t until she snapped some photos and got a closer look at the images that she realized that the other cat was a cougar.

“When I looked back at the photos I was taking, it was confirmed the cougar was attacking the bobcat, but the cougar was too heavy to get to the weak tip top,” Jordan said. “The cougar went up and down the tree in a flash.”

The incident started around 4:30 p.m. and went on for more than an hour. Then, it was too dark to see anymore.

“What an amazing and rare sight to see! We assumed the bobcat survived. It is unsettling to know there is a cougar in our neighbourhood, but we live on the side of a mountain with bears, deer, lynx and apparently cougars.”

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