Last weekend, we heard something on the back deck. My 8 year old thought it was a raccoon. Turns out, it was a bobcat.

I was able to grab a full frame camera and 400 mm lens and capture a few shots of the cat on the back fence. I did have to shoot from about 150 feet away, through a double-pane glass window (I didn’t want to go outside for safety reasons, and I thought it would likely spook the cat if I did).

It’s very rare to see one during daylight hours – I’ve never seen one so close.

There was a bit of discussion when I posted it on social media whether it was a bobcat, a mountain lion or a lynx.

I did check in with the State of Colorado, and they said:

Those are great photos! It’s a bobcat. In the one photo you can see the inside of it’s front leg, which is heavily barred (bobcats always have barring), and you can see that the underside of the tip of the tail is white (lynx tails always have a black tip all the way around). Ear tufts are relatively short (lynx longer, although it’s hard to tell with nothing to compare it to unless you’ve seen a ton of photos of the 2), and lynx are generally grayish rather than tanish and don’t have spots, although pelt color and spotting is really variable and not a great characteristic to use.