PHOENIX - When Denise Franczak-Johnson and her husband sat down for dinner at their north Phoenix home, they ended up with a special treat.
“My dog started barking and my husband saw it out of the corner of his eye,” she said.
It was a young bobcat hanging out on a tree branch, only a few feet away from the viewing fence that separates their backyard from the desert.
Denise pulled out her smartphone to take a picture but quickly changed her mind and got her Cannon EOS 7D camera and snapped pictures of the wildcat sitting in the tree only five feet from her.
“Oh my gosh. In the moment, [I was ] just admiring the beauty and his fur and the patterns on his coat. He's just an exquisite animal,” she said.
After posing for a few minutes, the bobcat disappeared into the desert landscape only to return again Monday morning.
“Just kind of checking us out and watching our morning chores,” Franczak-Johnson said.
Johnson noticed the bobcat was taking a particular interest in her pet tortoises. She has three of them in her backyard.
“I just sat there and waited for him to get uninterested and he left,” she said.
It's a reminder the bobcat is a wild one. Johnson says she admires it, but she doesn't want it to get too neighborly and blur the line between human and nature.
“We know what those boundaries are; the animals know what those boundaries are -- because if they get too close, we're going to do something to scare them off,” she said.
At no point did the bobcat cross over the viewing fence. Johnson never offered it food or tried to touch it. There was a mutual respect Franczak-Johnson will never forget.
“I never got to see one up that close and personal. I felt blessed on that,” she said.
Johnson believes the bobcat was in the area hunting for wild birds and rabbits in the area. She hopes it eventually heads back to the mountains where it’s safer for the wildlife.