This year the South African Wildlife Management Association symposium was held in the Western Cape, at Goudini Spa in the Boland. This was great for the Urban Caracal Project, as it was a short drive from Cape Town. I presented some of the early diet results and spoke about some of the management implications. These … Continue reading SAWMA symposium 2017
Another milestone reached: all the identifications are done! Of course, there are still some elusive kills and scat which I'll never be 100% sure on, but not from lack of trying. The last step for identifying species once all other methods had failed was looking at hair cuticle scale patterns. This requires making an impression … Continue reading Impressions: hair identification
The past week has seen me back at the Iziko South African museum in Company's Garden in town. It was a rat-run, pun intended. In my previous trips I was working with Graham Avery on identifying bird and larger mammal bones. This time around I met with his wife, Margaret Avery, who is an expert on … Continue reading Of mice and museums
I've been sorting out the caracal kills database over the last few weeks, filling in missing information and looking through photos of kills that never made it to the freezer for closer inspection. It can be tricky identifying a half-eaten prey item when you have it right in front of you, but this becomes much more … Continue reading When predator becomes urban caracal prey
The last few weeks have been spent preparing samples for further identification by bone. This involved carefully sorting through each cleaned and dried scat sample to pick out the hard bits (i.e. bones, teeth, claws and nails) and package them separately. This makes it easier for comparison to reference skeletal material. Next, I decided to … Continue reading “Oh look, another cape cormorant”: some trips to the museum
First, to introduce the main cat characters. Protea is one of the adult female caracals and the 24th cat to be captured on the Urban Caracal Project. Her territory stretches along the white, sandy beaches on the wild, west coast from the Cape of Good Hope lighthouse through to Kommetjie, which she uses as a … Continue reading Two killer kitties’ favourite snacks
The scat washing is now complete! This means that each and every scat found in the field has been scraped for DNA, aged, weighed, bagged, colour-coded, soaked, sieved under water, separated into constituent parts, dried, bones and teeth separated and, finally, packeted and labelled. Along this production line the prey items in the scat are … Continue reading Project milestone
