Felis chaus are also called the jungle cat. The length of their body is about 56–94cm, their tail length: 20-31cm. the height of their shoulder is about 40-50cm, and the males weight about 6.1kg and the females weight about 4.2kg. These cats have the coloration from sandy to red/brown or grey fur and there tail is colored black.

 

They have adapted to live in places like savannahs, tropical dry forest, and in the reed beds along the lakes and rivers. They are not found in the tropical rain forest. These cats have a slender build with long legs and a relatively short tail. Males may have faintly stripped legs and tail, the nose and chin are sometimes white. They have large ears with tufts and there cubs are born spotted. In some places, they are threatened by the loss of their habitat, but in other place they are not threatened. Their loss of their habitat is a contributing to the population change, but in other places where their habitat is not threatened their population is stable. The countries where these cats are found are South-east Turkey, in large parts of Caucasus, North-west Jordan, southern Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, South Western Russia, and most of central Asia.

 

They are the predators and that’s their role in the food web. These cats eats rodent, frogs, birds, and the ones that live by the body of water may even swim and dive in water in order to catch a fish. these cats may even have to compete with dogs, wolves, foxes, and coyotes in order to hunt for the rodents, they may even compete with weasels in order to get fish, they may compete with snakes and they even compete with human and dogs.

 

This kind of cat is heavily hunted and is found poisoned in Jordan. They are hunted for their fur. These cats avoid getting hunted by living in deserted houses which were once filled with people. The interesting characteristics of the F. chaus is that the males bark during the mating seasons and another one is that the males are very protective to their offspring, even more than females. The most important thing I learned was that they live in tropical dry forests and are hunted by humans just for their furs.

 

Author: Ashar K

Published: 02/2009

 

Sources: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/23.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_Cat www.allaboutfrogs.org/weird/general/numbers.html http://www.birdnature.com/predators.html

 

Photo Credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Felis_Chaus.jpg