Small Cats: Pampas and Mountain Cats

Pampas cat

With the obvious exception of the cheetah, cats are not generally pursuit predators. Rather than chasing their prey over a long distance, they pounce on them from ambush, dispatching them rapidly. As a result, they require habitats with plenty of opportunity for concealment, somewhere that they can hide themselves from potential prey until it's too late. The majority of small cat species are adapted to living in forests, where the bushes and other heavy undergrowth provide a perfect environment for this activity.

After the small cats of the Leopardus lineage first entered South America, it is just such places that most of their descendants ended up living in. This is where we find ocelots and all the other small spotted cats of the continent today. But, with little effective competition from other native predators (there really wasn't anything cat-like on the continent before they got there) it's perhaps unsurprising that some of them did adapt to different, more open habitats, as some of their more distant relatives had elsewhere.

Endangered Cats of the High Andes

A few weeks ago in the UK, we had the 10-yearly treat of filling in our national census forms. Once all the information from these forms is collected, we will have an official figure for the number of humans living in our country. Unfortunately, finding out the same figure for wild animals isn't quite so easy. Yet studying the population densities and numbers of wild animals is often of more than academic interest. A great many species are endangered, and without accurate ideas of how many of them are, we can't tell how endangered they might be, what strategies we might have to use to protect them, and whether or not those strategies are working.

Of course, animals can't fill in census forms, but there's more to it than that. If the animal lives in large, highly visible herds, it may not be so difficult - although even there, you have to be sure you're not counting the same animal twice, and that you're picking a suitably representative area to study (since, realistically, you're not going to go out there and do a head count of every such animal in existence). But many animals aren't so obliging. They may be small, they may actively hide from humans, they may be nocturnal or crepuscular, or they may just live somewhere its hard to get to, or in a jungle so full of plants its hard to spot anything. The rarer they are, the harder it becomes to find them, and yet those are exactly the ones we're most interested in.