The dense jungles of South and Central America are home to a wide variety of predators.
Some big, some scaly, some airborne, and some small.
This is the Tiger Cat.
While their size may not instill the same fear in you as their namesake,
this cat is nothing to sneeze at.
These tiny predators are the bane of tiny prey everywhere.
The Tiger Cat, or Oncilla, is the smallest member of their genus,
Leopardus, weighing just 15 percent of the weight of their beefy cousins, the Ocelot.
Recently, Oncillas have been split into two separate species,
the Northern and Southern Tiger Cat.
The focus of this episode is the Northern Tiger Cat.
Though there are small pockets in Central America, the Tiger Cat is found primarily in South America,
reaching as far south as Argentina.
These cats thrive among the trees, with their preferred habitats being dense jungle,
high altitude cloud forest, and humid montane and premontane forests.
But recently, Tiger Cats have been changing with the times.
As their habitats continue to be broken up by roads and knocked down to make way for farms,
Tiger Cats have had to push into new niches in order to survive.
They can now be found in savannas and Brazil's thorny scrubland, the-now-aptly-named Coatinga.
These cats are highly adaptable.
Unlike their larger cousins, the Margays,
Tiger Cats aren't terribly arboreal, despite being good climbers.
This has allowed them to conquer terrain that would be otherwise inhospitable to them.
They do however still prefer a life adjacent to trees,
as they offer good cover from predators, and an easy escape route when necessary.
Margays and Tiger Cats can be pretty hard to tell apart.
Yes, Tiger Cats are smaller, but not by enough for their weight alone to distinguish them.
There are three things that you can look at to check if it's a Tiger Cat.
First, is their eyes.
Their eyes are further apart than a Margay's.
The second, is their ears - these are larger than their cousins.
And finally, the Tiger Cat has a much pointier face than a Margay,
with a narrower skull and snout.
Their coats are covered in dark spots and rosettes,
meant to help them blend in with the foliage in their habitat.
Like most species of cats, Tiger Cats have full size spots on the back of their ears.
This is a form of self-mimicry - mimicking their own eyes in
order to deter predators from sneaking up on them.
Being such an elusive species, not much is known about what preys upon Tiger Cats,
but one species that we know will hunt them is the Ocelot.
When threatened, Tiger Cats will arch their back, raise their hair and bare their fangs.
It makes for a bit of an awkward walk,
but it is effective at making themselves look larger to ward off an attacker.
Smaller than an average house cat, you might be able to guess what a Tiger Cat likes to eat.
Birds and rats.
Why is it always rats?
These slender felines will take anything they can catch, and due to their diverse habitat,
lizards are also on the menu.
These cats are fast and have no problem chasing down even the nimblest of prey species.
Stalking or ambushing, their kills are always the same - a bite to the back of the skull,
severing the spinal cord, killing the prey instantly.
When hunting birds, Tiger Cats will clean the bird of all their feathers prior to eating them.
These cats are neat freaks.
Unfortunately for Tiger Cats, the birds they often hunt are the easiest targets; poultry.
This is one of the reasons why they are listed as vulnerable species - they
are targeted by poultry farmers in retaliation for killing their chickens.
Retaliation killings continue to be a leading cause of death for the Tiger Cats.
While the pelt trade for Tiger Cats has largely declined since its peak in the 70s and 80s,
they continue to suffer from habitat fragmentation by roads,
habitat destruction for agriculture and collisions with vehicles.
Another threat they face comes as a bi-product of humans trying to help.
In protected areas meant to conserve wildlife populations,
the much larger Ocelot is a bit of a bully.
Since they are larger and much more adaptable than Tiger Cats, the smaller cats are often
forced into unprotected regions, where they face the full brunt of humanity.
Tiger Cats need a large territory in order to thrive, with a range of up to 17 square
kilometres, this often takes them through dangerous territory, like roads and farms.
But Tiger Cats need to go where the food is.
Their diet and behaviour largely mirrors their prey.
Since what they hunt is largely terrestrial and nocturnal, so are they.
But in areas like the Coatinga,
where their prey consists of diurnal lizards, Tiger Cats are much more active during the day.
When they're not on the prowl, they'll be doing exactly what you'd expect, grooming.
Life.
Grooming.
Death.
The feline way.
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Thanks for watching and see you later!