"milk teeth" Springtime is baby time!
Last week our wildlife team ear-tagged another litter of bobcat kittens. The kittens are B328, B329, and B330 because they are the 328th, 329th, and 330th bobcats we've tracked during our study. We've been tracking their mom, B295, since January 2012 and this is the first litter we're aware of since then.
These are known as the kittens' "milk teeth" because they're essentially baby teeth. Bobcats are strict carnivores, but not much is known about when exactly they switch from nursing to eating meat. These kittens are about four weeks old, so they're definitely nursing at this age. Similar species have been documented to start eating meat starting around three months of age. Tooth eruption (first of baby teeth and then of adult teeth) is one of the ways biologists measure age. Original public domain image from Flickr