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WildCRU

Monday, October 27, 2008

postheadericon Clouded leopard captured

One morning in January 2008 Jo and I were met by an excited friend of ours who had news of a captured clouded leopard! Wong, who had been studying sun bears and beared pigs in Danum for over 10 years, informed us that his team had accidentally captured the cloudie in one of their traps set for pigs. This was fantastic news for us, as one of the primary aspects of our research was to learn how these threatened wild cats use their habitat, such as how much space do they need to survive? It turned out that the clouded leopard was a subadult female. After sedating her we fitted a radio collar to her to enable us to track her movements in the dense Ulu Segama forest. We named her Alumis, or Aly for short, which in the local Kadasan-Dusan language means beautiful. This was the first time this species of cat had been tagged. For several months afterward we successfully tracked Aly, although she frequently disappeared for a week or so. Then in March ’08, she vanished, despite our considerable efforts to find her.