Large, Tawny Feline Causes Small Scare in Thousand Oaks
A woman relaxing on the back porch of her Chalon Court home Thursday evening dialed 911 after seeing a tan furry elbow she thought belonged to a mountain lion sticking through the roof’s wooden slats.
But the animal turned out to be a bobcat, which is smaller and common in the Santa Monica Mountains near Thousand Oaks.
Stubby-tailed bobcats, which usually weigh about 20 pounds and are the size of large domestic cats, are often mistaken for much larger tawny mountain lions, wildlife officials said.
“It didn’t scare me. It’s actually kind of cute,” Whittney Kraft said.
After about half an hour of being ogled by several neighbors, the annoyed animal jumped off the roof into Kraft’s yard and climbed over a concrete wall into the next-door yard, where it hid beneath some bushes.
The animal resumed its suburban wandering before animal control officers arrived to corral it and return it to more rustic surroundings.
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