African wildcat

Name and taxonomy

Georg Forster named the species Felis lybica in 1780. His type came from Gafsa in Tunisia: house-cat sized, with reddish fur, black ear tufts and a ringed tail. Over the next century and a half, museum curators named more than twenty forms from skins and skulls across Africa and the Near East. Johann Gmelin's Felis ocreata of 1791 came from a cat seen in Ethiopia, and Anselme Desmarest's Felis cafra of 1822 from two Eastern Cape skins. For much of the 20th century the animal was treated as a subspecies of the wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica.

Since 2017 the Cat Specialist Group treats it as a species of its own with three subspecies. F. l. lybica lives in North Africa, Sinai and Sudan. The Southern African wildcat, F. l. cafra, lives in the south of the continent. The Asiatic wildcat, F. l. ornata, lives from the Caspian Sea to India and China. English names in use include Afro-Asiatic wildcat, bush cat, steppe cat and Indian desert cat.

Evolution and relatives

The cat family began to branch in Asia about 14.45 to 8.38 million years ago, according to nuclear DNA. The line that became the genus Felis split from the other small cats about 2.16 to 0.89 million years ago. The jungle cat left the Felis line first, then the black-footed cat, then the sand cat, then the African wildcat. The African wildcat and the European wildcat parted about 173,000 years ago. About 131,000 years ago the African form split again into Near Eastern, Southern African and Asiatic groups.

About 10,000 years ago farmers in the Fertile Crescent tamed some of these cats, probably because they hunted mice in grain stores. A cat buried beside a person at Shillourokambos in Cyprus, about 9,500 years ago, is the oldest sign of a bond between the two. Egypt tamed the wildcat a second time, and Egyptian cats spread around the Mediterranean from the 8th century BCE. By the 5th century CE they had reached the Baltic coast. Domestic cats trace back to at least five female founders in their mitochondrial DNA. The cats of Sardinia and Corsica were once called a wildcat subspecies, but they descend from domestic cats brought from the Near East.

Appearance

The coat is light sandy grey, sometimes with a yellow or reddish tint, and nearly white on the throat and belly. A dark line runs down the spine, and pale vertical stripes on the flanks often break up into spots. Two dark bars cross each cheek, and four to six bands cross the throat. The forelegs carry two dark rings, and the tail ends in two or three rings and a black tip. The ears are reddish to grey with a small tuft and long pale hairs around the rim.

Males from North Africa measure 47 to 59.7 centimetres from head to rump, with a tail of 26.7 to 36.8 cm. Females measure 40.6 to 55.8 cm, with a tail of 24.1 to 33.7 cm. Both sexes weigh 3.2 to 4.5 kilograms. Across the whole Afro-Asiatic range, weights from 2 to 8 kg have been recorded. The legs are longer than a house cat's, so the animal sits more upright and walks with a taller gait.

Next to the European wildcat, the African wildcat is smaller and shorter-haired. Its stripes on the neck and shoulders are faint, and its spinal stripe is less sharp. The tail is slender and tapers to the tip, where the European cat's tail is thick and blunt. A pure wildcat also has a plain tail base and reddish backs to the ears, which help to separate it from a feral tabby.

Habitat and range

The African wildcat lives across the whole of Africa apart from the dense rainforest of the Congo Basin. North of the Sahara it ranges from Morocco to Egypt. South of the desert it lives in the grasslands, savannas and shrublands from Mauritania to the Horn of Africa. It occurs in every country of East and Southern Africa. In the Sahara itself it is scarce and keeps to rough country such as the Hoggar Mountains.

Beyond Africa it lives in the Middle East, including parts of Arabia and most of Iran. It reaches the east shore of the Caspian Sea, crosses Kazakhstan and stops in Xinjiang in China. It also lives in Rajasthan in India. It has been recorded up to 3,000 metres above sea level. GBIF holds records from 55 countries, though that figure counts zoo animals and escapes as well as the native range.

In Syria it is widespread but uncommon, in the wooded coastal hills, the dry steppe around Palmyra and the south-west. A home range covers 1.7 to more than 50 square kilometres, depending on how much food the land offers. In the Kalahari, females held about 3.5 km2 and males 7.7 km2. One female in the United Arab Emirates used 52.7 km2 of desert. In the Serengeti the species lives at 10 to 100 cats per 100 km2.

Diet and hunting

Rodents are the main food: mice, rats, gerbils, jerboas and voles. Hares, small and medium birds such as francolins, lizards, snakes and insects fill out the diet. In the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park the cats live mostly on mice and rats, with birds, small reptiles and invertebrates as extras. In Southern Africa they also take antelope fawns, lambs and goat kids. In northern Namibia they kill Kirk's dik-dik, an antelope about their own weight.

The wildcat hunts by night and finds its prey by ear. Its hearing is sharp enough to fix the position of a mouse under cover. It creeps forward slowly, uses grass and bushes as cover, and ends the stalk with a short rush. It rarely drinks, because it gets most of its water from prey. Like other small cats, it probably kills with a bite to the neck.

Behaviour and social life

The African wildcat lives alone. Each adult holds a territory that it marks and defends. A male's range overlaps the ranges of up to three females. The species is mainly nocturnal, and it is most strictly so in hot country and near villages. By day it rests in bushes, though it may move about on dark cloudy days.

When it meets a threat it raises its fur to look larger and stands its ground. It is a capable climber and will take to a tree to escape dogs. Like other cats, it probably spends much of the night patrolling its range and much of the day asleep. Near people it grows warier and keeps more strictly to the dark hours.

Communication and senses

Hearing is the wildcat's first sense. The large ears turn fast and independently to pin down a rustle in the grass. Its eyes gather light well, as in all cats, so it sees in near darkness. Scent marks tell neighbours where one territory ends and the next begins.

The cat is quiet for most of the year. Calls come mostly in the breeding season, when males and females meet, and probably include the yowls, growls and hisses of a house cat. Raised fur, an arched back and flattened ears signal a threat. Like the domestic cat, it is thought to purr and to greet by rubbing.

Reproduction and life cycle

Gestation lasts 56 to 60 days. In Botswana most kittens arrive in the warm wet season, when rodents are plentiful. A litter usually holds one to three kittens, and litters of five have been seen. Across the whole range, litters of 1 to 6 are reported, and rarely up to 8. The mother gives birth in a hidden place such as thick grass, a burrow or a hollow tree.

The kittens open their eyes at about 10 to 14 days and move about at a month old. At about three months they begin to learn hunting from their mother. They leave her and live alone from about six months. They are sexually mature at 9 to 12 months, though a first litter probably comes at 18 to 22 months. A wild-born female of this species lived to about 19 years in captivity, and the wild lifespan is probably far shorter.

Predators and threats

Larger carnivores kill wildcats: leopards, caracals, jackals and hyenas take them where ranges overlap. Large owls and eagles probably take kittens. Domestic dogs kill many near farms, and cars kill more on roads. Farmers shoot and poison wildcats that take lambs and kids.

The largest threat is not a predator but a relative. Wild and domestic cats breed freely together, and their hybrids are fertile. In Asia the steppe-type wildcats look so much like tabbies that some populations may descend mostly from feral cats. Diseases that pass from domestic cats are thought to add to the pressure. Loss of grassland to farms and grazing removes both cover and rodents.

Population and conservation

The IUCN Red List rates the African wildcat as Least Concern. It is widespread, and its numbers are thought to be stable across most of the range, with declines in some regions. No firm total exists, because the animal is hard to tell from a feral tabby in the field. It is listed on CITES Appendix II, which controls trade in its skins.

Conservation work centres on keeping pure populations apart from domestic cats. Genetic tests now separate wild, hybrid and feral animals, and reserves in South Africa breed pure stock. A domestic cat can carry a wildcat embryo to term, which zoos have used to raise wildcat kittens. Libya put the species on a set of postage stamps with WWF in 1997.

Relationship with humans

No wild animal has lived closer to people for longer. The tamed wildcat became the house cat, which now lives on every continent except Antarctica. A Fifth Dynasty wall painting at Saqqara, from the 26th century BCE, shows a small cat in a collar, probably a tamed wildcat. Cats appear in Egyptian religious scenes from about 1980 BCE, and the earliest cat mummy known was made about 1350 BCE. From 664 BCE cat mummies were sold to pilgrims as offerings, and cemeteries at Bubastis and Saqqara held vast numbers of them.

Today the wildcat is a minor pest to sheep and goat farmers in Southern Africa. Its skin has little value, and it is not hunted for sport. The real harm runs the other way: pet and feral cats absorb the wild population through interbreeding. A kitten raised by hand stays shy and destructive, and it is not a pet.

In culture and myth

The cat's place in myth begins in Egypt. Mafdet, the first cat-headed god, kept snakes and scorpions out of the king's chambers in the First Dynasty. Bastet was shown with a lion's head at first, and from about 950 BCE with the head of a small cat. Herodotus wrote that her festival at Bubastis drew several hundred thousand pilgrims. Diodorus recorded that a crowd lynched a Roman for killing a cat, between 60 and 56 BCE, though the king tried to stop them.

At Pelusium in 525 BCE the Persian army reportedly pushed cats ahead of its front line, and the Egyptians would not strike. Some sub-Saharan stories, it is said, make the wildcat a watchful spirit that senses dangers people cannot see. The San are said to have believed that a cat's behaviour warned of trouble from the spirit world. Modern spirit-animal writing reads the wildcat as a sign of independence, which probably says more about the writer than the cat. The domestic cat's long trail of folklore, from witches' familiars to lucky black cats, all rests on this one wild species.