A young female bobcat was found minimally responsive in a person's yard in DuPage County, apparently after being struck by a car.

The finder contacted a responsible wildlife trapper, who contained her and brought her to Oaken Acres Wildlife Center in Sycamore, which transferred her to the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center for specialized care.

The center believes she is either an early spring kitten that lost her mother too soon or a late baby from 2025. According to Hoodline, Oaken Acres reports she was first hit by a car in Oregon, Illinois, before ending up on a woman's front porch.

Sedated at intake, the bobcat was found to be in generally good health aside from fluid in her abdomen, fleas and ticks, a badly fractured canine tooth, and — remarkably — an old, already-healed fracture of her scapula and old hip trauma.

Head veterinarian Dr. Sarah Reich told audacy.com, as reported by Hoodline, that "it is very likely that she was hit by a car initially and then unfortunately hit by a car again."

The broken canine tooth required extraction, and the center's dental unit, supported by staff and visiting veterinarians, removed it without needing to drill out bone.

The DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center says it has not worked with a bobcat since 2018, making this the facility's first bobcat patient in eight years.

Bobcats are native to Illinois and are the state's only wild cat species, typically centered around Oregon, Illinois, about 100 miles west of Chicago, though they are solitary, nocturnal, and almost never interact with people.

Hoodline reports the species was nearly wiped out statewide by the mid-1900s and was listed as threatened in Illinois from 1977 to 1999, later spreading from southern strongholds across the state — a 2021 camera-trap sighting in Will County's Sand Ridge Savanna Nature Preserve showed how close they now come to the Chicago area.

Staff are keeping handling to a minimum and plan to move her from an indoor run to an outdoor enclosure as quickly as possible, because wild bobcats become stressed in human care.

Dr. Reich says she is behaving exactly as she should — defensive and uninterested in humans — though she is "definitely going to take the cake" for the center's most vocal patient.

She is expected to be released back into the wild near where she was found by the end of the month, farther from the road that nearly ended her story twice.