Disclosure: I’m not affiliated with Cat In A Tree Rescue in any way — I just saw a news story about their work here in the Pacific Northwest, where we have some TALL trees. The inspiration for this episode’s intro was Dr. Barnes’s article, and it also mentions the rescue group.
It’s 11 p.m. and there you are, still sitting on the mattress you dragged out here and placed on the bare ground next to this tall tree in your back yard seven hours ago, still talking reassuring nothings up at the silent darkness of its uppermost branches and hoping that the neighbors can’t see you.
Every now and then, you play a laser dot over the tree trunk and mattress though, honestly, you saw three hours ago that it wasn’t going to work.
Dinner time came and went long ago, unheeded by either one of you. Now you’re really, really hungry.
Hey! Maybe, just maybe…
The branches rustle slightly as you reach into your coat pocket — Fluffy has been watching you, though you can’t see Fluffy.
Reach into the pocket. Slowly. Take out a flat round object. Be casual. Pay no attention to the tree branch rustling more and more. Slip a finger under the ring tab. Pull…
Along with the “pop” of the can comes a little noise up above and then a bump that you can feel through the mattress as well as hear, and suddenly young Fluffy is all over your lap, unhurt, purring frantically, nosing for the open can.
About an hour later, after you’re both back in the house, warm, full of good food, and cozied up together on the couch, with https://catinatreerescue.com/directory now bookmarked in your phone, you tell Fluffy that, yes, the squirrel was fascinating, but it easily came down again in a way that Fluffy could not.
“You see, little kitty, house cats aren’t one of the three kinds of cat who can do that maneuver, and if this ever happens again, especially on a work night, I’m calling in the professionals.”
Fluffy merely half-opens an eye as if bored by the whole business and asking, “What maneuver? What three cats?”
Dozing off yourself, you mumble, “Weird ankles,” and then, “These cats…”
22. Margays can hang upside down on a branch, holding on with one hind paw.
They don’t do this all the time, of course, just now and then as a rest break.
Brian Gratwicke, CC BY 2.0
Margays are adorable eleven-pound Latin American tree cats with a rosette-studded tawny coat and great round amber eyes that make you think of space aliens.
The little cats are very much of this world. While their range isn’t fully documented yet, margays probably prowl through forests from Mexican lowlands in the north all the way down to Uruguay and parts of Argentina. They’re seen most often in the Amazon Basin.
About that hanging balance trick — just like Fluffy (and the other two cats mentioned in this episode), margays have very sharp claws.
These get a good grip on a tree’s trunk as the cat’s powerful hind legs propel it upwards.
Unlike Fluffy, margays and the other two cats in this episode can also use their hind claws to hang on as they come back down face first and do other treetop stunts.
Note the balance-pole use of the tail, too.
This is possible because their ankles are flexible up to 180 degrees!
Wait. Which is the ankle on a four-legged critter, and which is the wrist?
23. Marbled cats, like all of Family Felidae, have wrists and ankles.
To see how this works, and if it seems appropriate to you, just get down on all fours (imagination works, too, but if you do this and are sharing space with a cat, it might earn you a head boop — bonus!).
Our ankles in this position, just like the cat’s ankles, are on the “hind legs,” and the wrists are on the “front legs.”
Obviously, some evolution has happened since cats and primates last shared a common ancestor back in the mid-Cretaceous, but this basic framework is the same throughout Class Mammalia.
The lighting is seldom purrfect, and marbled cats have GOOD camouflage! (Image: eMammal, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Speaking of evolution, one of the oldest small cats today — Asia’s marbled cat — also has 180-degree ankles like the margay, although it belongs to a completely different lineage and lives on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Perhaps marbled cats occasionally hang out upside down as the margay does, but who knows? They live in remote places — Nepal and India eastward into China, Southeast Asia, Sumatra, and Borneo — and were only photographed for the first time in the 1990s.
Very little is known about them, but they do have all their marbles — that is, the blotchy dark squares on their coats, called “marbles.”
Marbled cats spend a little more time on the ground than margays do, and they always keep their unusually long tail parallel with ground. I don’t know that anyone has ever recorded one moving through the trees.
Yet in another wild kitty with flexible ankles, a similar fur pattern is called “clouds”!
24. Clouded leopards might be big cats. Or not.
See? “Clouds,” even though the beautiful dark fur patterns resemble those on marbled cats.
Clouded leopards have 180-degree ankles, too, but at least in online videos they use that built-in flexibility for acrobatics rather than a margay-style “Look, Ma! One paw!” thing.
The second part of this gorgeous cat’s name is one of those “if it has spots, it’s a leopard” cases.
Clouded leopards are not closely related to leopards.
In fact, clouded leopards weren’t considered to be big cats for a long time.
Closer examination did show some big-cat technical details, though, and DNA testing later identified them as big cats.
But was the test accurate?
After all:
- Clouded leopards are small, weighing about 50 pounds at most.
- And they purr.
The Panther Ridge Conservancy checked, although they’re not ruling out a snore in this case.
- And they look quite different from any other cat.
Genetic testing now suggests that clouded leopards are very old and might even represent the “missing link” between big cats and the rest of Family Felidae!
This raises an interesting point: with marbled cats and clouded leopards being such ancient lines, did the very first cats also have those beautiful marbled/clouded coat patterns and the very flexible ankle?
It’s a question that, for now, goes unanswered.
Fur doesn’t fossilize, and the very first cats lived long before our ancestors evolved, so there is no eyewitness cave art to check.
As for that amazing 180-degree ankle, actually the oldest known fossil cats found thus far didn’t have it.
Their ankles were more like Fluffy’s. Unfortunately for them, there were no cat-rescue people around to help them get down out a tree.
But paleontologists have only dug up about a quarter of all the cat fossils that might be out there.
Let’s keep looking. A 180-degree fossilized feline ankle might settle the question, as would finding fossils of the Dawn Cat — stuck in the highest branches of a petrified tree.
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Sources include:
Barnes, L. 2023. Can cats climb down trees? https://cats.com/can-cats-climb-down-trees
Cat Specialist Group. 2023. Clouded leopard: Mainland.
http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=116
___. 2023 Clouded leopard: Sunda.
http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=225
___. 2023. Marbled cat.
http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=122
___. 2023. Margay.
http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=89
Hearn, A. J.; Ross, J.; Bernard, H.; Bakar, S. A.; and others. 2016. The first estimates of marbled cat Pardofelis marmorata population density from Bornean primary and selectively logged forest. PLoS One, 11(3): e0151046.
Johnson, W. E.; Eizirik, E.; Pecon-Slattery, J.; Murphy, W. J.; and others. 2006. The Late Miocene Radiation of Modern Felidae: A Genetic Assessment. Science, 311:73-77.
Kitchener, A. C.; Van Valkenburgh, B.; and Yamaguchi, N. 2010. Felid form and function, in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, ed. Macdonald, D. W., and Loveridge, A. J., 83-106. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kitchener, A. C.; Breitenmoser-Würsten, C.; Eizirik, E.; Gentry, A.; and others. 2017. A revised taxonomy of the Felidae: The final report of the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group. https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/32616/A_revised_Felidae_Taxonomy_CatNews.pdf
Macdonald, D. W.; Loveridge, A. J.; and Nowell, K. 2010. Dramatis personae: An introduction to the wild felids, in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, eds. Macdonald, D. W., and Loveridge, A. J., 3-58. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sunquist, M. and Sunquist, F. 2002. Wild Cats of the World. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=IF8nDwAAQBAJ
Werdelin, L., and Olsson, L. 1997. How the leopard got its spots: a phylogenetic view off the evolution of felid coat patterns. Biological Journal of the Linnaen Society. 62:383-400.
Werdelin, L.; Yamaguchi, N.; Johnson, W. E.; and O’Brien, S. J.. 2010. Phylogeny and evolution of cats (Felidae), in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, eds. Macdonald, D. W., and Loveridge, A. J., 59-82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wikipedia. 2023. Clouded leopard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clouded_leopard
Flight To Wonder 