Species account by Walt Emann, of Oberlin College. Sky Island Borderlands program, Spring 2021.
If you find yourself wandering around the Sonoran Desert wilderness, you ought to keep a sharp eye out for dangerous mammals and stalking felines, especially mountain lions. But you’ll be excited to know that mountain lions aren’t the only wild cats that live within the Madrean Sky Islands– another one of their smaller, considerably less intimidating-looking cousins, the ocelot (Leopardis pardalis), sometimes calls this region home as well. Ocelots might look beautifully sleek and maybe even snuggly, with golden fur and black-rimmed, chain-like spots, but these predators can grow to be agile hunters standing just about twice the size of your kitty at home and can sprint at nearly warp speed (38 mph/61 kmph).
They can live as old as 11 years in the wild fiercely defending a territory of up to 20 square miles or 52 sq km), and ocelot females (known as “queens;” males are called “torns”) raise a litter of 2-4 adorable ocelot kittens every year or so. They’re actually quite easily tamable at a young age; Salvador Dali famously owned a pet ocelot named Babou, but this seriously doesn’t mean anyone should. Tamed or not, they mature into vicious hunting machines. Almost like your housecat, they’ll be sleeping most of the day, but they then spend their nights stalking rodents, reptiles, jackrabbits, javelinas, or small deer. Ocelots will even take a swim (and they’re pretty good at it) to catch fish and frogs, and can expertly climb trees to silently ambush perching birds. Unfortunately, where their habitat intersects with developed cities, ocelots have also been known to eat small pets.
Most of the ocelot’s range extends over South American forests, grasslands, marshes, or thorn scrubs, but the northernmost part of their range just barely scrapes up into the southern tip of Texas and extreme southeast Arizona– even showing up on several of Sky Island Alliance’s camera traps! Over the last few decades, their populations have been pushed further south from wider regions of southeast Arizona and most of Texas. Habitat loss, eradication to protect small livestock, poultry, and folks’ pets, and most prominently the trade for these exotic pets and their gorgeous furs, have started to noticeably shrink these cats’ presence. On top of this, recent construction of the border wall has locked them out of their last remaining shreds of habitat in the American southwest. Luckily enough for conservationists, the IUCN Red List has labeled them as a species of Least Concern and they’re likely to be able to bounce back with a little helping hand from us humans.
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. El Aribabi, Sky Island Alliance.