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WildCRU

WildCRU
Saturday, August 28, 2010

postheadericon First wild cat photo from Kinabatangan!

10:07 AM | Posted by Andy Hearn | Edit Post
Our first wild cat photo- capture - a flat-headed cat
Three years of intensive camera trapping in our previous five Sabah field sites resulted in photographic captures of leopard cat (1000+), Sunda Clouded leopard (300+), marbled cat (100+), and bay cat (30). Over the same period we obtained just a single photograph of the elusive flat-headed cat, which was snapped just a few hundred metres from the Danum Valley Field Centre buildings! Indeed, throughout the historical range of this species (Peninsular Thailand and Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra) the flatty is infrequently recorded, raising concern as to its current status.

So with this in mind, we were particularly delighted, whilst checking our freshly deployed cameras in the Kinabatangan, to discover our first cat photo.... yep, a flat-headed cat! He/she was photographed close to the main Kinabatangan river, in a stretch of riparian forest.  Hopefully this is the first of many felid photos to come! 

So far we've also captured several images of sun bears.

2 comments:

SMitchell said...

Hi Andy,

I've heard that Flat-headed Cat is reasonably regular along the Kinabatangan? Isn't a riparian specialist?
Image here might be of interest
http://www.nickgarbutt.com/photo-galleries/rainforests

Cheers,

Simon Mitchell

January 21, 2011 at 6:35 PM
Anonymous said...

Hi,
I work as a mammal curator at a US zoo and saw a flat-headed cat in June of 2010 on the Kinabatangan near Sukau - one of my colleagues on the trip photographed it. We showed it to Marc Ancrenaz who verifed it was a flat-headed cat. We watched the animal for about 3 minutes during a night cruise -we got fairly close to the cat and he/she just sat and watched us - it was quite exciting. Carol

May 12, 2011 at 2:03 AM
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