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A persistent biologist provides the first look into the nocturnal life of a pint-sized predator in South Africa

Every muscle in Lamu's small, wiry body tightens. She is now 40 minutes into a nighttime stalk, and her snakelike tail swishes violently as she closes in on a black bustard bedded down, chickenlike, in the brick red sand of the Kalahari Desert. I hold my breath.

Lamu is a black-footed cat, one of the least-known felids in the world, and as a bright moon bathes this arid landscape in a natural spotlight, I am able to watch her hunting behavior. The bustard opens one eye warily and for a fraction of a second looks as if it is about to erupt skyward with the insultingly loud scream I have witnessed so frequently before. But Lamu moves fast. Planting her tiny black feet into the ground, she leaps, snagging the bustard as it attempts to fly. The bird, half Lamu's weight, struggles only for seconds before the predator's needle-sharp teeth break its neck.

Black-footed cats are dwarfs in the cat world--2 to 3 pounds for females, 3 to 5 pounds for males. What we know about them comes mostly from anecdotes, many prompted by their fierce behavior when cornered by dogs.

Bushmen suspect, incorrectly, that they are able to kill giraffes by piercing their jugulars, for instance, and as with most of the other small cat species that roam the world, their secretive habits have prevented us from learning about their behavior and ecology in the wild. I was determined to change that, and for the last five years I have followed radio-collared black-footed cats through their busy nights. As a result, I have observed these little-known creatures more than any other person on Earth, in the process building a picture of what this diminutive cat is really like and particularly how it hunts.

# posted by Medical Information : 4:00 AM