What it means
Scottsdale has two wild cats and locals talk about them very differently. The bobcat is a neighbor. It is a spotted, tawny-gray cat about twice the size of a house cat, with tufted ears, a ruff of cheek fur and a tail that stops after a few inches with a black tip. It sits on block walls in the sun, drinks from pools and hunts the rabbits and quail that the neighborhood’s irrigation feeds. A photo of one on the wall is a standard group-text in DC Ranch and Troon. Nobody is especially alarmed, and nobody should be.
The mountain lion, also called cougar or puma, is a rumor. It is a plain tan cat the size of a big dog, 75 to 150 pounds, with a long, thick tail that is the surest field mark. Lions move through the McDowells following deer and javelina, and show up on the Conservancy’s trail cameras often enough to prove they exist and seldom enough that a confirmed image is news. The desert wildlife field guide files both under the reward column rather than the risk column, and the numbers back it up.
Where you’ll meet it
Bobcats: any neighborhood that borders desert, from the Preserve edge to the Greenbelt, at dawn and dusk, often on a wall. Mountain lions: the trail cameras of the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, the back country of McDowell Mountain Regional Park, and the breathless neighborhood post that turns out to be a bobcat.
Where the word came from
Bobcat is the easy one: the tail is bobbed, and American English named the animal for it. The scientific name, Lynx rufus, places it with the lynxes; Game and Fish still notes the old synonym Felis rufus. Older Arizonans say wildcat, the same animal.
The lion has more names than any mammal in the Americas, because it has the largest range of any of them. Spanish speakers called it león; Easterners said panther and catamount; in the West it became mountain lion and cougar, the latter a French mangling of a Tupi word from Brazil. Puma is Quechua and is the scientific genus, Puma concolor, “the cat of one color.” Game and Fish says mountain lion, and so do locals.
The Scottsdale story of both cats is really the story of the Preserve. When the Conservancy and Game and Fish ran the first full wildlife inventory from January 2011 to November 2013, they set trail cameras from spring 2012 to May 2013 and documented 25 mammal species, bobcat and cougar among them, along with mule deer, javelina, gray fox and a single black bear paw print. The report’s point was that the 30,000-acre Preserve works as a corridor between the Tonto National Forest and McDowell Mountain Regional Park, the only reason a lion ever turns up a mile from a golf course. The Conservancy’s newer camera study, begun in 2022 with Arizona State University at 60 sites, keeps counting.
What it is not
A bobcat is not a baby mountain lion, which is the most common misidentification Game and Fish fields; lion kittens are spotted but have long tails and are rarely alone. A mountain lion is not a jaguar, which has rosettes and has not been confirmed in the Phoenix area. And the big tawny animal trotting down a wash at dusk is, nine times in ten, a coyote.
The fine print
The attack record is short. Game and Fish counts six mountain lion attacks on people in Arizona since 1988 and no fatal attack in the state’s history; it takes 80 to 100 lion calls a year, many of which prove to be bobcats, large dogs or house cats. Its protocol if you meet one is specific: do not approach, do not run, face the animal, make eye contact, look bigger by raising your arms or opening your jacket, speak loudly, throw what you can reach without crouching, back away slowly, and fight back if attacked. Lions can leap 20 feet up and 40 feet across, so a block wall is not a fence to them. Report attacks to 911 and all encounters, urban sightings and property damage to the department’s dispatch at 623-236-7201.
Bobcats get a different sheet. They weigh roughly 15 to 30 pounds in Arizona, live about seven years in the wild, and eat rabbits first, then rodents, birds and, occasionally, small unattended pets and backyard poultry. Game and Fish’s advice is housekeeping: keep small pets indoors or in roofed enclosures, supervise them at night, walk them leashed, cover poultry, and remove the birdseed and water that pull in the rabbits a bobcat is really after. A sick or aggressive one is a call to county animal control or the department.
What the record does not hold is a count. Nobody knows how many bobcats live in Scottsdale; the Preserve surveys documented presence, not population. The dogs guide treats the bobcat as a reason to leash on trails and keep the small dog in after dark, the right size of worry.