The elusive fishing cat

We got off the boat on a rickety jetty badly in need of repair. Behind it the trail disappeared into the forest. As walked through the mangrove forest in the morning, we noticed tracks (featured photo). The ground was unevenly wet, and there was a small section of the path along which there were a few pug marks.

It looked like a small cat had walked by. It couldn’t have been very heavy if one was to judge by how deep the marks were. One way to gauge the weight in mud like this is to push your fingers into the ground. The amount of effort it takes to push in your fingers to the same depth gives you an idea of the effort you would make to hold the dead weight of the animal in your arms. The marks could not be very old either, since it had rained quite heavily at night.

In any case, Bhitarkanika National Park is not known to hold large cats. It could have been one of the three smaller cats: the jungle cat, the fishing cat and the leopard cat. I haven’t seen any of these. They are shy creatures, like all wild cats, and their small size makes them harder to spot than their more famous relatives: tigers and leopards.

Bijaya was certain that it was a fishing cat. But I was not certain that my luck would take me so close to one. A recent census of wildlife inside the park had spotted three fishing cats to eleven jungle cats. Although the census was very likely to be incomplete (it had counted a single hyena) it perhaps can be taken as an indication that there are about four times as many jungle cats as fishing cats in the forest. Unless someone can tell me something about the shape of the pug marks which identifies the species, I think it unlikely that we saw a fishing cat.