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6th September, 2010
DANAU GIRANG: Oxford University researcher, Andrew Hearn, has been religiously visiting villages in rural Sabah, speaking to the locals and trudging through rough terrains placing camera traps and collecting data on five of Borneo’s cat species. He has been doing this for nearly four years and remains very passionate about his quest.
There are five species of cats in Borneo, he says. And almost nothing is known about all of them.
Andrew, who is currently based at the Danau Girang Field Centre in Kinabatangan, a facility co-managed by the Sabah Wildlife Department and Cardiff University said that the Borneo cat species comprise of the Leopard Cat, the Bornean Bay Cat, the Flat Headed Cat, the Sunda Clouded Leopard Cat and the Marbled Cat.
The Leopard Cat, he said, is quite common and can be found throughout Southeast Asia right up to Russia.
“So, we are not really worried about this species because it is widely dispersed and it actually does well in oil palm plantations,” he said.
The other four species of cats, on the other hand, have restricted distribution.
The Bornean Bay Cat is only found in the island of Borneo and was first photographed between 2001 and 2002.
“This is incredible in today’s day and age, and we know almost nothing about this animal…we have very small information that they were sighted here in the 1900s but apart from that, we know nothing. No one has ever studied it, so this is a species that we are particularly interested in looking at,” he said.
Then there is the flat headed cat. Again, this species has never been studied and there is a lack of information concerning them. Its distribution, said Andrew, is restricted and that the species can be found in Borneo, Sumatra and parts of Peninsula Malaysia and possibly on the very southern area of Thailand.
“From the looks of it, this cat is restricted to the lowlands which had been traditionally the area where villages are sited and where the people are more prone to cutting the forests down. So this is a big problem for this species because there is now almost zero habitat for them,” he said.
He added that as more and more researches are being done in Southeast Asia, people are setting up a lot of camera traps but images of the flat headed cat species are hardly showing up in any of the traps.
“No one is detecting them and this is making us worried because this species of cats might be the first to go extinct in Borneo. This is the species we are most focusing on in the Kinabatangan, which we feel has the highest population of the species,” he said.
“If we do well with the camera traps and manage to detect them, we will start to track these cats and attach radio collars on them to start learning about how they use the environment, which area they go into, how they move or if they move in the different forests or between the fragmented forests.”
The next cat species, the Sunda Clouded Leopard, the largest cat found in Borneo, can also be found in Sumatra.
“We are using this species as our flagship…again, not much is known about this cat. It is the same old story with all the species,” he said.
However, they have already managed to come up with an estimate of the species’ density population.
“We found out that it is actually lower than that of the orangutans which are found to be at densities of perhaps one to five individuals per square kilometers. The Sunda Clouded Leopard population density estimate is between three and six individuals per hundred square kilometers,” he said.
The Marbled Cat, he said, is also unknown except for the fact that it is diurnal and hunts during the day.
Since he began installing camera traps with the help of several assistants four years ago, he has collected a total of 50,000 wildlife photos.
“When we have pictures of the cats taken, we study their spot patterns as a means to identify them,” he said.
Eventually, they hope to come up with a map that will give an estimate as to where the cats can be found.
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