8 Ways To Find The Best Web Design Agencies For Your…The bay cat, named for its brownish-red coat, is arguably the most elusive of all the world’s wildcats. And among the most endangered.
There is a photograph of the bay cat I can’t get out of my head. In it, the cat looks intensely right at the viewer, its sun-yellow eyes sporting two dark lines running up from them as if someone had applied makeup. In the mix of light and shade, its coat passes from brown to orange to blood red. Its long tail is tipped in white. The animal is in a dingy cage, littered with dead rats, but that doesn’t detract a bit from the cat’s majesty and strangeness.
A bay cat hunting in the Nuluhon Trusmadi Forest Reserve in Sabah, Borneo, at 1,503 meters altitude, making it a possible elevation record for this species. Most photos of bay cats are fleeting images caught on camera traps. Image courtesy of Andrew Hearn.Despite years doing field research, biologist Susan Cheyne has never seen a bay cat. There’s even “some speculation that it doesn’t exist,” she says.
So, how do we know it still exists? Because researchers and conservationists like Cheyne and Wearn continue to capture fleeting bay cat images on camera traps, albeit rarely — really rarely. Collectively, researchers have recorded it less than a hundred times, according to Wai-Ming Wong, the director of small cat conservation science at the cat NGOAnd those appearances have been devilishly sporadic.
A bay cat captured on camera trap in Tabin Wildlife Reserve in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Image courtesy of Andrew Hearn.Whatever the density, scientists say they believe the bay cat population is in decline, as with many other mammals in Borneo. Humans have destroyed about half of Borneo’s forests since the 1970s. So, logically, a forest-dependent species like the bay cat would have probably seen a dramatic drop in numbers in recent decades.
The cats are becoming harder to find in some locales. For example, Wong says his colleagues failed to photograph a bay cat in the Deramakot Forest Reserve in Sabah during their most recent round of camera trapping. This is worrying because Panthera has been camera trapping there since 2014, and its scientists’ sighting of bay cats caused them to believe the area was a “potential stronghold” for the species.