An endangered small wild cat native to Thailand’s wetlands has been sighted for the first time in 30 years, the country’s wildlife authorities have said.
The flat-headed cat has long been feared extinct in the tropical kingdom, where it inhabits peatlands, mangrove forests, and marshes that are difficult to access.
The last confirmed sighting was in 1995. Now 30 years later, the flat-headed cat has surfaced following a camera trap survey in southern Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary.
Here, night-vision cameras documented 29 sightings of the animal, which included a female with her kitten. The news was released by the country’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, along with the world’s premier wild cat conservation organization, Panthera.
“The rediscovery is exciting, yet concerning at the same time,” veterinarian and researcher Kaset Sutasha of Kasetsart University told the South China Morning Post. “What comes after this is more important—how to enable them to live alongside us sustainably, without being threatened.”
The fear of Sutasha and others is that the habitat of the animal has become too fragmented to provide the hunting range and genetic diversity it needs to thrive. This nocturnal hunter preys on swamp animals, including frogs, fish, and crustaceans. They will also prey on rats, and a domestic chicken if they can get their paws on them.
The animal is well adapted to its aquatic surroundings, and is capable of catching fish by submerging its whole head in water to strike.
Panthera’s small wild cat conservation program had been a back-burner project until 2021, when GNN reported exclusively that the former chairman of a billion-dollar veterinary diagnostics company, Jon Ayers, had taken a position on the conservation NGO’s board, inspired by a personal fascination with small wild cats.
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At the time, the organization’s founder Dr. Thomas Kaplan told GNN that the major challenge with small wild cat conservation is a lack of knowledge and that before any long-term conservation program could be implemented, significant camera trap surveys were needed to establish the facts on the ground for animals like the flat-headed cat, of which very little is known.
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Panthera is well-regarding for its conservation work around lions, jaguars, and leopards, with its partners in the US government having frequently admitted that if Panthera can’t save a wild cat, nobody can.
In light of that, the good news may not so much be that flat-headed cats were seen in Thailand, but that it was Panthera which saw them.
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