The sand cat, Felis margarita, is difficult to find. Also known as the dune cat, this desert feline is not only quiet and as sneaky as a house cat, but is evolutionarily equipped for stealth. The sand cats have a light coat that makes them difficult to detect in their desert habitat; they have special foot pads that leave almost no trace in the sand; not to mention, the felines also crouch down and close their eyes when light is shined on them, making them invisible to eye tracking devises.

 

This might explain why researchers have had such a difficult time getting a handle on learning just how many of the cats there are living in the animal's geographic range, which includes parts of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and central Asia. In the United Arab Emirates, where a sand cat had not been spotted in the wild for over a decade, it was estimated back in 2005 that less than 250 of the animals remained. However, no hard data as to their numbers was available.

 

Working in the Baynouna protected areas, researchers set up five camera traps in the preserve in March 2015. They then placed cans of chicken and fish-flavored cat food near the motion-sensitive cameras.

 

A month later, the researchers caught their first glimpse of a sand cat. They added four more cameras, and by December of last year they had collected 46 images of three sand cats, two females and a male. The researchers describe their work in a paper recently published in The European Journal of Wildlife Research. Most of the sightings took place between midnight and 6 A.M., and about 40 percent of the sightings happened during the full moon. That’s because the cats sleep in dens during the day, coming out at night to hunt small reptiles and rodents.

 

The study will begin to give researchers some idea of the population density of the rare cats and help them figure out which habitats the felines prefer. (Smithsonian.com)

 

 

PHOTO CREDIT: (yairleibo/iStock).