Sleeping is done in burrows, rock crevices or thick bush, sometimes in trees. Like most species of cat, the caracal is predominantly nocturnal, travelling up to 20 km per night in search of food. Large prey animals are covered with grass after the initial feeding, to be consumed later. A kill is often dragged into dense cover where it can be eaten without disturbance. New grass or fruit is also sometimes eaten, probably for the moisture content. Other prey items include rodents, hares, small antelope, carrion and reptiles, including poisonous snakes. When consuming birds, they pluck the larger ones before eating, and eat the smaller ones whole. They were also used to hunt antelope, hares, and foxes, much like the cheetah in Africa. They were put in arena containing a flock of pigeons, and wagers were made to see how many they would take down. This is the origination of the expression ‘to put a cat amongst the pigeons’. Ten to a dozen pigeons at one time can be taken this way, and the caracal was once tamed and trained for bird hunting in India and Iran. In South Africa, adult male home ranges were 31 – 65 square km, while those of the females were four to 31 square km.Ĭaracals are remarkable jumpers, and can jump several feet into the air to knock flushed birds down with their paw. Males have a home range which includes that of several females, and as solitary animals they come together only for mating. Although they can be considered the fastest cat of their size, their hunting technique is the stalk and spring method like that of the domestic cat. Their gait is similar to the cheetah Acinonyx jubatus, but they are not sprinters, and take to the trees if pursued by dogs. During the hot hours of the day, they rest in crevices, and hunt mainly in the cooler morning, night and evening hours. As a desert animal, they can survive long periods without drinking. They are found in woodlands, savannahs and acacia scrub throughout Africa jungle scrub and deserts in India and arid, sandy regions and steppes in Asia. Melanistic caracals have been reported, though only rarely.Įssentially an animal of dry regions, the caracal has a wide habitat tolerance. They also lack the ruff of hairs around the face which are so predominant in the northern cats. Although they are called ‘desert lynx’, caracals have longer legs, a more slender body, and the tail is considerably longer than true lynx. The short, dense coat is slightly longer and whiter on the underside. Black backed ears, dark spots on both sides of the muzzle, black spots above the eyes and a black stripe from the eye to the nose break up an otherwise uniform tawny-brown to brick-red coloring. Large, tapering ears with five cm erect tufts of black hair, used for communication, are probably the most unique feature of this cat. Reproduction 1 – 4 kittens born after 78 – 81 day gestationĬolouring Sandy coloured, white underside, black spots above eyes and on whiskersĬaracal means ‘black ears’ in Turkish. State protection would afford this cute, keystone creature a better chance at surviving the California energy-development boom.Range Central and South Africa, SW Asia, Middle East To defend the desert kit fox and its dry, scrubby, but ecologically vital habitat, in 2013 the Center petitioned California to protect the desert kit fox as threatened under the California Endangered Species Act. Other threats to the foxes abound, including grazing, urbanization, agriculture, climate change and mortality from vehicles on roads that are increasingly crisscrossing their range - as well as off-road vehicles that drive over dens, potentially causing cave-ins that crush kit fox pups. Even smart, climate-saving clean-energy development like solar projects are often badly sited and destroy important kit fox habitat - and also, possibly, help spread kit fox-killing diseases like canine distemper: In Riverside County in 20, the first-ever documented outbreak of the disease in desert kit fox caused a local die-off when it hit desert kit foxes in an area surrounding the Genesis Solar energy development site. But these wild-canine quarters are increasingly empty - or destroyed - due to large-scale industrial energy development rapidly on the rise across the kit fox range. You can see the keyhole-shaped entrances of kit fox burrows scattered across a wide area of California's Mojave and Colorado deserts. The last administration failed to protect many species on the brink of extinction.
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