An extremely elusive creature called a bay cat has been
photographed in stunning detail in its native Borneo in Southeast
Asia.
The new image, which was captured by a photographer working with
the wildcat conservation organization Panthera, is one of the first
high-resolution images taken of the enigmatic species. Previously,
grainy camera-trap images were the main evidence of the cat's
existence.
The bay cat, or Pardofelis badia, is a mysterious
little wildcat that lives only on the island of Borneo, which
includes the countries of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. The
diminutive hunters are smaller than the average house cat and have
either ruddy chestnut or grayish coats. Their nocturnal nature and
secretive demeanors, combined with a low population density, make
sightings of the cats incredibly rare. Almost nothing is known
about what they eat or how they reproduce.
Logging has threatened some of these cats' tropical forest
habitats, and the creature is now listed as endangered by the
International Union for Conservation of Nature. In the past, the
elusive cats were only documented in poor-resolution camera-trap
images first captured in 1998. In November 2013, another research
team captured several camera-trap images of the cats, along with
sunda clouded leopard and marbled cats.
To find out more about the species, photographer Sebastian
Kennerknecht and Andrew Hearn, a researcher at Oxford University's
Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, went out into the rainforests
of Borneo on the hunt for the bay cat. The team took two trips but
managed to get just one photo of the cat.
"During the first trip, we were able to get pictures of a marble
cat and Sunda clouded leopards, but the bay cat proved
elusive," Kennerknecht said in an email. "Only on the second trip
did we get this single picture. It is of a grey phased male that
Andrew has gotten on camera before."
To find the cat, the team chose spots to place customized digital
SLR camera traps where Hearn had sighted bay cats before,
Kennerknecht said. The cameras shoot when an animal crosses an
infrared sensor.
The image was captured in the unlogged lowland rainforests of
Malaysian Borneo.
