Watch a Bobcat Snatch a Turkey Out of Midair in This Incredible Trail Cam Video

Every year, the trail cam website Trailcampro puts on a video contest. And the 2025 winner’s submission of a bobcat catching a flying turkey is worth watching twice — first, in real-time, and again in slow-motion. (We recommend adjusting the playback speed to .25.) 

The winning video was captured in Western Oregon in July 2024, and it shows a bobcat snatching a wild turkey out of midair. The trail cam clip is just 10 seconds long, and the real action occurs in the first two seconds, as the hen takes flight and the bobcat follows suit. The cat’s vertical leap takes it nearly out of frame as it stretches, fully extending its body to grab the big bird out of the air. The two come tumbling to the ground in a ball of feathers. Then the bobcat rolls the flapping turkey offscreen.

“This particular cat had a kitten to feed,” Selah Tenney, the video’s owner, wrote in the comment section of Trailcampro’s Facebook post. 

Tenney had to correct some other Facebook users, who claimed the cat was a younger mountain lion, and not a bobcat. (It’s definitely a bobcat.)

“Right place, right time and the camera worked perfectly,” Tenney wrote in a separate post about the clip. “Plus the young hen was not alert to her surroundings, enabling the mother bobcat to make her move.” 

Tenney, who won a new Browning trail cam for the video submission, did not respond immediately to OL’s interview request. But the landowner explained in another comment that they’ve gotten a few other videos of the same bobcat with one of its kittens. This bobcat and others hunt wild turkeys on their property in Douglas County, Tenney says, and most of those hunts are unsuccessful.

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“We have tons of turkeys and see bobcats make failed attempts more than actually make a kill,” Tenney wrote. “The turkey population around here is strong.”

Tenney’s Facebook profile is filled with other trail cam videos from their property, which lies in Douglas County and is quintessentially Pacific Northwest. The wet forest is a lush green, the ground covered in ferns, and Tenney’s videos show the woods teeming with other wildlife, like blacktail deer, otters, elk, and bald eagles.

“This is a normal result of such turkey/bobcat interactions,” Tenney wrote in the description of another bobcat-turkey video shared to Facebook in November. (Looking at the timestamp, it was recorded a little more than four months after the winning video.) “Close, but no cigar.” 

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“The bobcats seldom make the kill,” Tenney explained in her description of the video, which was recorded in a different spot on the property than the July clip. “Interestingly, this camera location has found that the turkeys fly into this area on a regular basis, from the ridge across the creek. I wonder if this bobcat was aware of this pattern.”

Bobcats are known turkey predators. Along with coyotes and other nest-raiders, they can have real impacts on bird populations, and some studies in the South have pointed to bobcats as one of the top predators of adult hen turkeys. Tenney added in her November post, however, that ravens and crows kill poults and steal eggs relentlessly on their Oregon property, and that they suspect those avian predators have had more of an impact on local turkey populations than bobcats.   

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Source: https://www.outdoorlife.com/survival/video-bobcat-turkey-midair/