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Borries, C.; Koenig, A.
Opportunistic sampling of felid sightings can yield estimates of relative abundance
2014 Cat News (61): 34-37
Likely due to their often solitary and nocturnal lifestyle we still know comparatively little about wild cats and every additional information is important. During the course of our study on the Phayre's leaf monkey population Trachypithecus phayrei crepusculus at Phu Khieo Wildlife Sanctuary (Thailand) we recorded all felid sightings (N = 117) for 7 consecutive years. It took more than 3.5 years before all 8 cat species known to occur in the sanctuary had been encountered. With 80.3 % of all sightings the leopard cat _Prionailurus bengalensis_ was the most abundant species, 3 species accounted for 7.7 - 2.6 % each, and the remaining 4 species were encountered less than 2 % each. With two exceptions these results matched the published records based on camera-trapping and life-trapping. We suggest that similar datasets should be generated by colleagues involved in long-term research.
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