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Stalking The BLACK-FOOTED CAT - wild cats in South Africa
International Wildlife, May 3, 1999
A persistent biologist provides the first look into the nocturnal life of a pint-sized predator in South Africa
Every muscle in Lamu's small, wiry body tightens. She is now 40 minutes into a nighttime stalk, and her snakelike tail swishes violently as she closes in on a black bustard bedded down, chickenlike, in the brick red sand of the Kalahari Desert. I hold my breath.
Lamu is a black-footed cat, one of the least-known felids in the world, and as a bright moon bathes this arid landscape in a natural spotlight, I am able to watch her hunting behavior. The bustard opens one eye warily and for a fraction of a second looks as if it is about to erupt skyward with the insultingly loud scream I have witnessed so frequently before. But Lamu moves fast. Planting her tiny black feet into the ground, she leaps, snagging the bustard as it attempts to fly. The bird, half Lamu's weight, struggles only for seconds before the predator's needle-sharp teeth break its neck.
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Black-footed cats are dwarfs in the cat world--2 to 3 pounds for females, 3 to 5 pounds for males. What we know about them comes mostly from anecdotes, many prompted by their fierce behavior when cornered by dogs.
Bushmen suspect, incorrectly, that they are able to kill giraffes by piercing their jugulars, for instance, and as with most of the other small cat species that roam the world, their secretive habits have prevented us from learning about their behavior and ecology in the wild. I was determined to change that, and for the last five years I have followed radio-collared black-footed cats through their busy nights. As a result, I have observed these little-known creatures more than any other person on Earth, in the process building a picture of what this diminutive cat is really like and particularly how it hunts.
My relationship with Lamu began on a large game farm in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, where the three dry landscapes of the grassveld, the dwarf shrub steppe of the Karoo and the red sands of the Kalahari meet. I had come to know this area intimately while studying nocturnal aardwolves for a three-year doctoral thesis. In those hundreds of nights following aardwolves, I caught sight of the blue reflecting eyes of black-footed cats only for seconds before they turned and slinked away, low to the ground. I knew then that I wanted to learn more about these obscure predators, and thus began an ongoing study in the arid lands of South Africa that was to include two eventful years with Lamu.
I first met this remarkable cat in 1993 when I captured her as part of a plan to radio collar nine other individuals so that I could follow them to begin to understand their secretive lives. She was petite, but very pretty, with a sleek, tawny and black-spotted coat, and I was amazed how quickly she accepted the presence of my 2-ton 4x4 pickup truck rumbling behind her. I named her Lamu, in part because she didn't run very far when I followed her to a den--almost appearing lame.
That same night, minutes after I'd strapped a radio collar on her and my immobilizing drug had worn off, she trotted off in effortless style. Zigzagging around the area's low dwarf shrubs, she quickly surprised a hairy-footed gerbil feeding on grass seeds. There was no struggle when she broke its neck a split second later--no long cat-and-mouse play.
Strangely, Lamu did not eat the gerbil but carried it off--with me in pursuit in my truck. After traveling half a mile, she depressed her ears, lowered her head and uttered a soft contact call. Her single kitten, whom I was to name Rani, came running from a grass tuft with her tail high up in the air. In one fluid movement, Rani streaked past her mother and grabbed the gerbil. With typical black-foot table manners, the youngster gobbled the head first, then swallowed the rest of the body in one go. Now I knew why Lamu had accepted my presence so quickly: Her concern for her hungry kitten must have been greater than her fear of my vehicle.
As I watched, Lamu briefly groomed her blood-stained chest then quickly trotted off to hunt again. In the course of the night, she caught three more mice and two larks and brought them all back to Rani. She also fed herself: Two hours before dawn, she returned to a black bustard carcass she had hidden previously under sand and grass, safe from scavengers. She ate her fill, an enormous amount for such a small animal. By weighing what remained of the bird after she'd finished, I calculated that she had consumed a half pound of meat, equivalent to one-fifth of her own body weight.
In the weeks to come, Lamu increased her hunting effort even more, belying the original meaning of her name. Whatever the weather condition--from violent thunder and dust storms to days of clear, calm skies--she always set out at sunset. By night's end, with the rising sun peering again over the flat horizon, she returned to any of various dens originally dug in the hard-baked soil by nocturnal rodents called springhares. Clapper larks often mobbed her along the way.
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