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Small Cats, Looming Large
by John Tidwell

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Zerenlamu pulled her twisted, black braid aside and leaned close to the well-thumbed field guide, studying its images for several minutes. Then she sat up and roughly slapped the page with the back of her hand. "We have this cat," she said with typical Tibetan finality.

Jim Sanderson (right) and a Tibetan woman hold a Chinese mountain cat skin in Tibet. (Yin Yufeng)

In the summer of 2003, ecologist Jim Sanderson had been traveling for weeks, in and out of almost every remote village in northwestern Sichuan Province in China, searching for evidence of the Chinese mountain cat (Felis bieti), one of the rarest wild felines on Earth. But every time he asked, locals stared blankly at the book's illustrations and shook their heads, saying, "No, we've seen nothing like that."

Now, amid the bustle of a local greasy spoon in a rustic town nestled high in the foothills of the Tibetan Plateau, there was a glimmer of hope. A grizzled hunter hunched next to Zerenlamu eyed the drawing and snorted that it was a different animal—"the one with long hair"—and pointed at Pallas' cat (Felis manul), a more common local species. But the stout Tibetan housewife was resolute. "I've caught this cat," she said gruffly. "I've skinned it and made it into hats. I know this cat."

Sanderson asked where she'd caught it, and Zerenlamu gestured west, toward the snowcapped peaks of the plateau. Anecdotal, perhaps, but for Sanderson and other scientists who venture out to the world's wild places seeking "mystery species" like the Chinese mountain cat, getting insights from locals is a crucial first step.

Lanky, with a perpetual silvery stubble, 57-year-old Sanderson has a reputation for being a flinty iconoclast who can track down "unfindable" cat species others have sought in vain. In 1997, he was the first to study the petite kodkod (Leopardus guigna) in the Chilean wilderness. Two years later, he headed into the high Andes to take the first photos of the supposedly extinct Andean mountain cat (Leopardus jacobitus). And last year, after many weeks looking for the Chinese mountain cat on the Tibetan Plateau, Sanderson flew to the island of Borneo, trekking through jungle in search of the spoor of the bizarre flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps).

While such fieldwork may seem like high adventure, it's more often arduous, exacting work that requires great tenacity, resourcefulness, and the unswerving dedication of an apostle, qualities common to many small-cat scientists like Sanderson. But why do all this for an elusive creature that spits and hisses when you come near? Sanderson's gaze is unwavering, fervid, almost feline. "Cats are without question nature's most perfect creatures," he says. "We suspect that almost every species in the cat family is in danger of extinction, and most people don't even know they exist. Something must be done."

The Forgotten Majority

Servals (Leptailurus serval) are small cats that are native to Africa.

Everyone's heard of the big cats—lions and tigers—and most of us are even aware that they are endangered. For centuries these animals have been potent symbols of power and majesty in our culture, and many people find the idea that big cats could disappear forever deeply unsettling. Large, conspicuous felines have also been easier for scientists to study in the wild. As a result, big-cat conservation has received the lion's share of publicity and funding for nearly half a century. During that time small, wild cat species, usually classified as those weighing less than 45 pounds, were often overlooked or considered less worthy of study.

John Seidensticker, a preeminent cat biologist who heads the Smithsonian National Zoo's Species Conservation Center, remembers the reaction of his Nepalese colleagues when he suggested including a few local leopards in his Smithsonian study of wild tigers in Nepal during the 1970s. "They said, 'Why are you wasting your time and money on leopards? They aren't important,'" recalls Seidensticker. "Imagine if I had wanted to study a little jungle cat. People would really have looked down their nose at me."

Most of the cat family—six of the eight major lineages and more than half of all 40 cat species—are small. They are found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, and in less than ten million years (brief by evolutionary standards) have evolved to live in many different ecological niches: from southern Asia's water-loving fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) to the black-footed cat (Felis nigripes), which roams the deserts of southern Africa.

The majority of these small felines appear on the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, but most people are familiar with only a few: the ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), the bobcat (Lynx rufus), the lynx (Lynx spp.), and, of course, the domestic housecat (Felis catus). The rest remain ciphers, even to their neighboring villagers. Scientific information on most small, wild cat species remains cursory at best. In many cases, their population numbers are estimated based on the size and condition of the forests they are thought to inhabit. Whether they are actually there is anyone's guess.

Seidensticker says that until recently, experts considered the jungle cat (Felis chaus) to be a relatively common species, primarily found in wetlands and forests from Vietnam to the Nile Valley. But when scientists at the Wildlife Conservation Society surveyed its Southeast Asian population in 2003, they discovered most reports were based on a single Cambodian specimen. In fact, the researchers found that jungle cats are now very rare from Thailand to Vietnam and completely gone in Laos. No one knows their status outside of Southeast Asia, and experts fear they may be one of Africa's rarest cats. If this could happen to a supposedly common species, what about those thought to be rare? "Most of what we know about these small cats comes from old reports and stuffed museum specimens," says Seidensticker. "For many of them, we have no information at all. They could go extinct under our very noses and we wouldn't know it."

Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) and their close relatives, bobcats, are among the few small cats most people recognize.

What to do? Seidensticker says there is currently no organized conservation strategy specifically for each of the small cats. Usually, scientists hope that existing projects designed to protect big cats, which need large areas of forest to roam in, will also benefit small felines that live there too—and to a degree, they probably do. But what about those who live where there are no lions and tigers, like the Chinese mountain cat? And are the threats facing big cats really the same for small ones? Indeed, so little is known about small wild felids that a one-size-fits-all strategy might not work well enough to prevent their continued decline.

The only solution, most cat specialists agree, is to lace up the hiking boots and go looking for these elusive felines in the wild, gathering precise data about where they are, what they need, and why they are disappearing. But how do you find increasingly rare small-cat species (most really good at hiding) in often vast, inaccessible places?

Desperately Seeking Wild Cats

Looking for secretive animals like the Chinese mountain cat can often appear quixotic, even to other scientists. After abandoning a 20-year career as a top Los Alamos National Laboratory mathematician to teach wildlife ecology, Jim Sanderson headed down to southern Chile in 1997 to search for the kodkod, a speckled cat that his colleagues said couldn't be found. Exploring Isla Grande de Chiloé, an island off the Pacific coast, he found the kodkod in just two weeks, and returned later to conduct the first field study of this tiny feline. In 1999, when Sanderson flew high into the Chilean Andes to find the legendary Andean mountain cat, experts doubted he'd catch anything but a cold. But he succeeded again in less than a year, with the help of Bolivian researchers Lilian Vilalba and Elisao del Gado.

When Sanderson first sought the Chinese mountain cat in the summer of 2002, he had to do it on his own time, during an unrelated tree survey in China's Sichuan Province. During the month he was there, Sanderson did what most mammalogists do when they start searching for species: He went to every rural marketplace he could find. If the cat still existed, hunters would probably be selling its shaggy pelt in town. Weeks passed with no luck, until one evening when Sanderson noticed a tawny fur hanging in a village shop. The owner claimed it was a fox. "They had stretched out its nose with a light-up toy beeper," Sanderson recalls. "But as I looked at it, I realized this was actually a catskin!" Confirming that it was the mountain cat in his handbook, Jim bought his scientific proof for about $4, and later used it in regional conservation lectures. The strategy worked: During one talk, a man stood up and said it was the kind of fur he'd slept on as a baby in the far western countryside.

Two successive trips to western China (still during off hours from other jobs) yielded more skins and a startling deduction, gleaned from Tibetan hunters who referred to Felis bieti as a "grass cat." "Scientists first called it a desert cat, then the Chinese steppe cat, then the Chinese mountain cat," says Sanderson. "But we learned it's not in montane forests at all, it lives in high-elevation grasslands. So all these years, people were looking in the wrong habitat."

When Sanderson returned to China last summer, he used these insights to chart a new location for his quest: the vast windswept plains of Kekexili National Nature Reserve, some 17,000 square miles of alpine grasslands where western Qinghai Province vaults into the Tibetan Plateau. Averaging 15,000 feet above sea level, the reserve is isolated, like an island in the sky. Scientists suspect this "Lost World" is home to a rich spectrum of plant and animal species, many still unknown to science. Sanderson's battered white vans followed the wide Qumar River out to a dusty Tibetan village called Cuochi, where local herdsmen nodded at the picture of the mountain cat, and then produced a pelt Jim recognized instantly as Pallas' cat. But what these villagers lacked in scientific knowledge, they made up for in experience. From them, Sanderson learned that, like the Pallas' cat, mountain cats probably live in burrows, but hunt at night. "When it snows," the hunters said, "you can follow the cat's tracks to its den."

Sanderson returned to China in January 2007 with the backing of private conservation groups. This time, he headed for the southeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, armed with high-tech tools that have revolutionized field research in recent decades: camera traps and collars fitted with radio transmitters. Because the mountain cat may be nocturnal, Sanderson also brought night-vision binoculars that can pierce the deepest gloom.

Capturing a Ghost

Frozen in mid-stride, the cat looks serene, like a monarch surveying his realm with whiskery satisfaction. In June 2003, the first image ever taken of a bay cat (Catopuma badia) in the wild was snapped by the animal itself, as it walked through the undergrowth of Borneo's Bentuang Karimun National Park. Zoologist Mohammed Azlan of the University of Malaysia in Sarawak, had set up the camera trap deep in the jungle, and left it there for two months. When the bay cat padded by one day, the camera's infrared sensor detected its body heat and snapped a photo, documenting its identity in a flash.

A clouded leopard caught by a camera trap. (Thailand Carnivore Conservation Project)

Scientists have used camera traps since the 1930s, but they were often a hit-or-miss way to collect data. When zoologist Ullas Karanth used them to study tigers in India, he found that by arranging many cameras in a grid pattern he could monitor large areas of forest and get information not only where he expected to find tigers, but also where he didn't.

Today camera traps are an indispensable tool for studying animals in the wild. Traditionally, field researchers sat in camouflaged blinds for hours, writing what they saw and trying not to nod off. By contrast, Karanth's remote-photography method allowed small 35mm cameras with motion sensors to document many acres of wilderness simultaneously, day or night, producing more accurate data in a fraction of the time and cost. Venerable cat scientist Mel Sunquist oversaw the installation of camera traps at 135 different sites for a tiger study by graduate student Kae Kawanishi in Malaysia's Taman Negara National Park. The cameras not only got 35 photos of tigers, but also thousands of images of other forest animals. "We got weasels, pheasants, Asian golden cats, wild dogs—who knew they were in there?" Sunquist says. "You put out these cameras and you find out everything that's going on in a forest."

Jim Sanderson likes using camera traps because they are particularly effective at capturing images of nocturnal small cats that have long evaded heavy-booted researchers in the wild. In South America and Asia, Sanderson helped launch scores of forest-monitoring studies, training local researchers to use camera traps and often letting them run the projects. "I always refer to Jim as the 'Johnny Appleseed' of camera traps," chuckles Sunquist. "He runs around the world putting out cameras here and there, seeing if they grow." Azlan was one of Jim's graduate students in northwestern Borneo, who learned to use camera traps to search for rare felines in some of the last intact rainforests. Azlan says that out of thousands of photos he got only one of the bay cat, indicating how perilously small this animal's population must be.

Isolated for millions of years, Borneo's bay cat may be a closed-forest specialist—although it has been recorded in logged-over and secondary forests, its long-term survival in such forests is unknown. More than 30 years of logging, oil palm plantations, and forest fires have now shrunk Borneo's rainforests by half, raising fears in the early 1990s that the bay cat, which went unseen for more than a decade, had become extinct. Then, Azlan's camera trap showed that at least one still remained.

That same year, John Seidensticker and colleagues Eric Wikramanayake and Suchitra Balagalle were hunting for another reclusive feline far to the west, on the island of Sri Lanka as part of a National Zoo study, using camera traps in a very different environment.

Following reports of fishing cat sightings, Seidensticker's team decided to set up its cameras in a location few scientists would have chosen: the middle of Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital city. Centuries earlier, the center of this sprawling metropolis had been a natural wetland, home to stocky, panther-like fishing cats that ranged over most of southern Asia. As the city grew, small areas of wetland remained, hidden in weed-choked canals and undeveloped stands of mangrove. What Seidensticker and his colleagues wanted to find out was how fishing cats, long assumed to be sensitive to habitat damage, could survive amid the hubbub of a big city in mere fragments of wetland. The research would also indicate how these water-loving felines were affected by water pollution.

National Zoo scientists study fishing cats in the wild.

Wetlands in South Asia, like most parts of the world, have been heavily degraded by agricultural fertilizer, urban development, and drought caused by deforestation. According to a 2004 report in the Indian daily newspaper The Hindu, more than 115 wetlands across the subcontinent contained high levels of toxic pollutants, including pesticides like DDT. Because fishing cats are so dependent on swamps and streams, Seidensticker says his ongoing study's data can help scientists in Colombo assess the purity of the area's water by counting how many P. viverrinus are there. "Fishing cats are the wetlands version of the canary in the mineshaft," Seidensticker explains. "If the cats are abundant and healthy, the water is clean."

The Clouded Leopard Project, a partnership of Thailand's Department of National Parks, WildAid Thailand, and the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center, has used camera traps at 22 sites in the Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai National Park complex in Thailand, more than 840 square miles of tropical wilderness. Since it began in 2004, the project's cameras have snapped thousands of photos of rare clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa) and other small cats including leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis), marbled cats (Pardofelis marmorata), and Asian golden cats (Catopuma temminickii), providing a unique glimpse into the lives and habits of these vanishing felids.

In 2003, Texas A&M University-Kingsville's Feline Research Program, led by Lon Grassman, used camera traps and radiocollars to track clouded leopards, Asian golden cats, and marbled cats in the Phu Khieo Wildlife Sanctuary. Once captured and fitted with radiocollars, wild cats and other animals were successfully tracked, even in dense jungle, showing scientists where their home ranges were and what parts of the forest different species preferred. Combining radiotelemetry data with thousands of camera-trap photos not only let the Texas researchers collect lots of valuable new information on many unstudied wild cats, it also provided Thai police with a fascinating way to fight crime, because Grassman's camera traps often took photos of poachers hunting illegally in the national park, letting park rangers and police see where poachers were active.

Protected forests in Thailand have become some of the last refuges of native wild cats in Southeast Asia. But in recent decades, as the pervasive illegal wildlife trade systematically hunted out big cats in the region for their skins, the beautifully spotted fur of smaller felines became the trade's new target—and in greater numbers. While a woman's fur coat, for example, might require the pelts of two large leopards, a similarly sized garment might need 20 or more marbled-cat skins. Even though international trade in leopard cats, marbled cats, and Asian golden cats has been forbidden since the 1970s, illicit shipments of their skins, bones, and body parts continue to be discovered by customs officials, most heading for the markets of China, where international law often can't follow.

Most cat scientists agree that to be effective, efforts to curb or eradicate the illegal wildlife trade must include reducing or eliminating demand for wildlife products in consumer countries, and better control of poaching in forests where the wildlife trade starts. If wild cat populations in these countries are regularly tracked, it should become clear when and where some species begin disappearing. These kinds of precise data could also help police in high-poaching countries like Thailand take a bite out of the illegal wildlife trade.

As the results of isolated studies of small cats like those in Thailand began to filter in, concern about the cats' survival has escalated in recent years among scientists and conservation groups. The more than 200 experts that make up the IUCN's Cat Specialist Group also helped launch a variety of small-cat research projects, including one on the bay cat in Borneo's eastern Danum Valley that was funded by the nonprofit Cat Action Treasury. Sanderson teamed up with Conservation International and the Wildlife Conservation Network to create the Small Cat Conservation Alliance, which now funds field work and helps draw attention to the plight of diminutive cat species.

Like many of the world's small cats, the margay (Leopardus wiedii) of Central and South America is elusive, and the size of its overall population is unknown. It has been hunted extensively for its skin.

The People's Wild Cat

As he put his mountain-cat skin away after giving a conservation lecture in China last year, Jim Sanderson was approached by a student. Known by his single Tibetan name of Drubgyal (Sylvester to his Western friends), the young man told Sanderson he wanted to help find Felis bieti, and that shaggy wild cats near his home village in northern Sichuan Province looked very much like the tawny pelt Jim had just displayed. It was a lucky break for the American scientist.

In February of last year, Sanderson and Yin Yufeng, a graduate student from Beijing University, followed Drubgyal to the village of Longhri, in Sichuan's Nyawa Tibetan and Chang Autonomous Prefecture. Its rolling hills dotted with herds of yak and round Tibetan ger tents, Longhri is only about 11 miles west of the town where Zerenlamu first recognized the mountain cat in Jim's field guide. Operating on a shoestring budget in frigid, snowy conditions, Sanderson and his two students have now spent months in the surrounding hills setting up some 40 camera traps, measuring paw prints, finding likely burrows, and observing local rodents that mountain cats might hunt. Such basic information is gradually forming a picture of the feline's role in this alpine ecosystem, and helping determine the best way to protect it.

As always, Sanderson is being "Johnny Appleseed." He is training Yin and Drubgyal to be keen scientists, and he often invites villagers from Longhri to help with survey work, so they can become some of the cat's most ardent protectors. It's a strategy that the conservation community has increasingly embraced: Show locals how safeguarding their environment and its wildlife by preserving natural resources, ranching livestock sustainably, and creating ecotourism in their area can benefit their communities. Sanderson says it's a very Buddhist concept that the Tibetans of Longhri understood immediately. "The more they learn about it, the more they see it as their cat, a legacy of their land," he says. "For small cats and other threatened species, that's the best protection you are ever going to find."

—John Tidwell is a freelance journalist who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

More: Living Small

ZooGoer 3(2) 2007. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.

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