The African golden cat attacking a group of red colobus monkeys.
Conservationists have recorded the first video of the African golden cat, the continent's least-studied wild cat and one of the planet's most elusive. In the footage, captured in Kibale national park in south Uganda, the cat stalks and rushes a group of red colobus monkeys before appearing to back off.
The camera trap film follows the recent publication of the first photographs of African golden cat kittens, which suggested that mothers of the two colorings of the species — a reddish brown and gray — can produce kittens of both colors.
Caracal aurata is a medium-size cat, about twice the size of a domestic cat, and strongly built. The secretive animal is found only in central and western Africa and is rarely seen, with most of our knowledge of the cat coming from an increasing use of camera traps, which first photographed a living African golden cat in 2002.
Another new film shows one of the cats sleeping in a tree in Uganda’s Kalinzu forest reserve, where it is harassed by monkey calls until it climbs down.
Laila Bahaa-el-din, a researcher for the endangered cat NGO Panthera, said the footage shed new light on the creature's hunting techniques. "It really does give us insight. We really never had any footage like that before. The monkey must weigh more than the cat itself.
"This was a cat we didn't know anything about a few years ago. It was thought to be nocturnal; we now know it isn't. It was thought to spend most of its time in the trees; we now know it actually spends most of its time on the ground. Here, we're learning it hunts on the ground, not in trees, even if it goes up to the trees sometimes for security."
Bahaa-el-din has been studying the species for four years but said it was so secretive and remarkable in its ability to stay hidden that she had only ever sighted one cat.
Despite being poorly understood, the cats are already feared to be at risk from human development. "The status of the African golden cat in the wild has never been rigorously assessed, but the species is increasingly threatened by habitat degradation, loss and fragmentation, and by unsustainable hunting," according to one study on them.
"We've just been assessing it for the Red List [of endangered species] and the evidence is pretty dire. Bushmeat hunting is pretty ubiquitous across their range, and golden cats are really prone to getting caught in snares," Bahaa-el-din said.
The camera traps were set by researchers studying primates rather than cats — Samuel Angedakin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and by Yasuko Tashiro of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University.
