Dec 10
BBC (Matt Walker)
One of the world’s most rare and elusive cats, the Sunda clouded leopard of Malaysia, has been filmed up close.
A biologist holidaying in Malaysia has captured unique footage of a young female leopard resting in the forest.
Previously, this top predator has only been filmed fleetingly and at a distance, with the first wild footage to be made public captured in 2010.
Beijing: A pair of endangered Amur leopards has been spotted in northeastern China, an indication that population of the extremely rare cat is recovering in the country.
In 2007, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concluded that Amur leopards were extinct in China and only 19 to 26 survived in Russia.
It is the first time that field cameras caught two Amur leopards at the same time in northeastern Chinese province of Jilin, home to a quarter of all the rarest cats in the world.
NBC News (Miguel Llanos)
Africa’s lions are running out of habitat and some populations, especially those in West Africa, are running toward extinction, according to a study published Tuesday.
Using new satellite data, a research team at Duke University found that about 75 percent of Africa’s savannahs were fragmented by farmers and other development in the last 50 years.
Scientific American (John R. Platt)
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week that African lions (Panthera leo leo) may deserve protected status under the Endangered Species Act. The decision, published November 27 in the Federal Register, comes in response to a petition filed in March 2011 by five conservation groups that argued that American hunters pose a major threat to a species that is already in serious decline.
African lion populations have declined by about 50 percent over the past three decades. Current estimates put the total number of the big cats at fewer than 35,000.
Arizona Game and Fish Department
New photography of an ocelot that has apparently persisted in the Huachuca Mountains since February 2011 was obtained Friday by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
The new sighting was in the same general vicinity of the original sighting. Game and Fish analysis of the photography, taken by a sportsman whose dogs treed the ocelot, appears to confirm that it was the same animal. Photographs will be reviewed with other species experts to verify the Game and Fish conclusions.
NBC
An elusive thick-furred feline has been caught on camera for the first time in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
A camera trap captured images of the fluffy Pallas’s cat, also known as the manul, in the country’s sprawling Wangchuck Centennial Park (WCP), which is also home to the snow leopard and Himalayan black bear. Pallas’s cats had never been documented in the region before, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
REAWR | Big-Cat Conservation 