What kind of cat is this! I can't see or pet it, but I have to clean up its poop every day

I study desert cats, so every holiday I am always asked by my relatives: "When will you bring us a litter to raise?"

Whenever this happens, I can only explain with great effort: " How can you raise a wild animal that is protected by the first class of the state just because you want to... "

Fortunately, my mother always came to the rescue in time: "What's the point of studying cats? I'm an expert in feces. I carve patterns on feces every day . Do you want some cat feces?"

Mom! Listen to me! Thank you!

Desert cats are watching you ~ | Big Cats

How did the desert cat end up in a place where people live?

As to how I wanted to be a zoological researcher but ended up carving flowers on shit every day, I have to start from the beginning.

Three years ago, my supervisor arranged for me to go to the Qilian Mountains to study desert cats. When I heard this slightly mysterious name and saw the pair of bright and clear blue eyes in the photo , I wiped my saliva and headed straight to the wild with my friends from the Cat Alliance.

Desert Cats | Big Cats

The desert cat (Felis bieti) is the only species of wild cats that is endemic to China and is listed as a national first-class protected wild animal. Desert cats are mainly distributed in the eastern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and are mostly found in Qinghai, Sichuan and other places. Although the name contains "desert", they actually live in mountain forest edges, shrubs and meadows. Because we have not conducted much ecological research on desert cats and their whereabouts are secretive, they are called " one of the most mysterious cats ."

Our survey site is Menyuan County, Qinghai Province . It is neither a mountain nor a meadow. There are large fields of highland barley and rapeseed flowers, surrounded by shallow mountain pastures. It is a habitat that has been obviously transformed by humans . It is in such a place that desert cats have often appeared in recent years .

According to locals, desert cats appear in farmland to catch moles, cross the road with food in their mouths, and even run to villagers' homes to steal chickens . Before this, we had never heard of so many desert cats around any city.

Desert cat crosses the road with prey in mouth | Big Cat

Here, desert cats no longer seem mysterious, they become commonplace.

The purpose of our visit to Menyuan is to study why desert cats appear here and what attracts them from their natural habitat to this human-dominated habitat .

The "bad" cat poops in front of people's door every day

However, when I arrived at Menyuan, I found that it was not easy to see desert cats. Three consecutive night patrols yielded nothing. Only a few red foxes appeared sporadically in the bare farmland in October. It was not until the fourth night that we spotted a desert cat passing by in the artificial forest.

Cats can hide from people, but cat feces can't escape, so we decided to go into the artificial forest where the desert cat was found to look for cat feces . Due to the promotion of the policy of returning farmland to forest, Menyuan County has planned many small patches of artificial forests between farmlands, planting drought-resistant plants such as sea buckthorn, Qinghai spruce, and multi-branched tamarisk.

The feeling of entering the sea buckthorn forest is that it pricks people to death ! As the dominant species in the artificial forest, the sea buckthorns grow well and gradually connect into a patch. Sea buckthorns about 1.5 meters tall are responsible for pricking the face, those 1 meter tall are responsible for pricking the buttocks, and those shorter can poke the legs as much as they want. If the fabric of the pants is suitable, they will happily poke into the pants, and by the way, I screamed miserably when I sat in the car exhausted.

Dense sea buckthorn bushes | Photo provided by the author

After drilling a few times inside, we found an interesting phenomenon:

Unlike domestic cats, desert cats poop very casually and are not particular about it . Walking in the bushes, they poop anywhere. When they come across the entrance of a marmot or badger hole, they poop at the entrance. When they see a mound of dirt made by a zorrat, they poop on the mound... After pooping, they don't even bury it, leaving it hanging there. The biggest victim, the zorrat, said that his mound of dirt often becomes a fixed toilet, and when the desert cat comes, he poops there , causing the stench to fill the air nearby, making it impossible to sleep!

A zokor's dirt pile. A closer look reveals more than one piece of cat feces (DNA confirmed it to be cat feces). The zokor: "It's hard to judge..." | Photo courtesy of the author

But this made it convenient for us despicable outsiders to steal cat feces and carry them back to the laboratory happily. As the saying goes, food is the first necessity of people, and the same is true for animals. After getting the feces of desert cats, we can understand the composition of their food through the DNA in the feces . As the saying goes, "fats are a mirror, and you can know what dinner will be for you"! The food composition of desert cats may help us better understand why they appear near cities.

Before you can pick up poop, you must first learn to identify it.

Cat poop is a technical job. First of all, you need to know what cat poop looks like. In order to help you quickly identify various feces, I made a simple "Wild Poop Quick Check Manual".

The animal feces currently encountered in the wild can be roughly divided into the following categories according to their morphological characteristics:

[Note] This is a violent classification because the appearance of feces in the wild is affected by many factors. For example, its shape, color, and size may be related to the animal's last meal, as well as climatic conditions.

01 Cutting the sausage has a sharp point

Photo courtesy of the author

This type of feces mostly comes from carnivorous animals. The most common ones around us are the feces of various cats and dogs . Of course, in the wild, there may also be feces from wolves, bears, foxes, etc.

The scent is strong and lasts long , so friends who have cats and dogs should be on the upwind side when their masters are solving problems.

The feces of desert cats are usually in the shape of a standard pointed cylinder with a diameter of about 2.5 cm. Due to the dry weather in Menyuan, they are usually dry or even crushed when I find them, but this does not prevent the odor from lasting. After a day of feces collection, I often smell like cat feces and become a mobile giant cat litter box.

Desert cat feces. The marker next to it can be used as a scale. Photo provided by the author

However, every time you dig out a pile of feces, you feel the joy of opening a blind box , because you never know what is hidden in the next pile - it could be the shattered head shell of a mole, a pile of undigested grass, or a furry tail from who knows who, or a piece of snake skin... It greatly caters to the psychology of fans of collection games.

02 Taiwanese grilled sausage

Photo courtesy of the author

This type of feces is similar to the previous one, but each small cylinder is separated from each other and the tip is relatively blunt. Most of them come from rodents , but due to the differences in the body size of the animals themselves, the size of the feces varies greatly.

The feces of various common mice are usually small, and the feces of house mice are only 0.2-0.3 cm. Slightly larger ones, such as marmots, will use abandoned holes as family toilets. The fresh feces are piled together, which are large, smelly, and soft, making it difficult to start.

03 A pile of small balls

Photo courtesy of the author

The third type is small round particles, mostly from lagomorphs or some ungulates (such as sheep) . For example, a healthy rabbit can produce feces with uniform size and shape, round surface and mucus as shown in the figure below.

Rabbits are so cute, of course they eat in poop | Photo provided by the author

In contrast, the pika's feces are smaller and rounder, and look a lot like the weird snack "Panda Dan" sold at the stall at the school gate when I was in elementary school for 50 cents a box. I wonder if it tastes the same...

04 Shelled Peanuts

Photo courtesy of the author

Compared with the former, this type of feces is not as round, but the surface is more moist and smooth, and there are also a large number of small particles accumulated, mostly from even-toed ungulates . For example, the feces of muntjacs, when placed in a petri dish, looks like a plate of peanuts painted with shiny black paint.

05 Kidney Shape

Photo courtesy of the author

This type of larger, kidney-shaped or oblate droppings usually comes from slightly larger ungulates , such as horses, donkeys or camels.

06 A real mess!

Photo courtesy of the author

Of course, you can never avoid them when you go out into the wild near pastoral areas - cow dung . Whether it is used to build walls, burn stoves or as natural fertilizer, cow dung is an indispensable thing in people's daily life.

For many insect friends, cow dung is an excellent breeding ground (I won’t post pictures), so you can often see this wonderful scene on the plateau pastures: flocks of red-billed choughs feasting in piles of cow dung. They are not eating feces, but catching insects in the cow dung.

But when the target area where I was looking for desert cat feces suddenly had hundreds of piles of fresh, wet, and pungent...cow dung overnight, I felt really bad.

07 Unexpected Situation

Photo courtesy of the author

Of course, in the wild, we will also encounter human remains of various shapes, which often successfully mimic the feces of various animals and are then picked up and brought back to the laboratory...

One day, I went out to the wild with my junior sister to collect feces. After we came down the mountain, she said to me with bright eyes: "I picked up a piece of feces on the hillside. It was very thick. The 50 mL centrifuge tube could hardly contain it. It might be from a snow leopard!" We have never picked up snow leopard feces here. If the DNA identification is correct, this is really a good discovery.

I looked at the sample, and a sense of foreboding suddenly came over me, so I asked, " Did you see any used toilet paper nearby when you picked it up? "

The next second, we were all silent...

On the road to becoming an expert in shitology, there will always be some Waterloo.

From shit, we can know...

Through DNA in the feces of desert cats, we found that compared with the red fox and leopard cat, two carnivores that live in the same area and eat whatever they catch, the food composition of desert cats is significantly more simple, with rodents and lagomorphs accounting for more than 80% of their diet . They especially love root voles, and in the feces of desert cats we tested, root voles DNA appeared in 90% of the samples.

Perhaps here in Menyuan, the mosaic structure formed by the dense sea buckthorn forest and farmland can provide shelter and abundant food resources for desert cats, attracting them to live here .

Infrared camera captures desert cat holding prey | Photo provided by the author

However, close human activities also pose a certain threat to the survival of desert cats. The night before leaving Menyuan, when we went to the city to buy sea buckthorn juice, we saw a desert cat corpse that had been crushed into two dimensions by wheels on the national highway . The bloodstains on the road were still clear. Perhaps a few hours ago, it was still snoring in its sleep, or perhaps it had enjoyed a fat vole the night before...

Our research on desert cats is still in its infancy : How do they live here? What is the population density? What threats will they face? There are still many questions that we cannot answer for now, but through continuous research, we may have answers in the future. From research to protection, we still have a long way to go.

Desert cat enjoying a feast｜Big Cat

I study desert cats, but I have rarely had the opportunity to meet them. So often, I forget that I have a dream of being a "zoological researcher" and become a complete "shit expert".

But then I suddenly realized, who says that we must meet face to face to study animals? Just like in modern society, online communication can solve many problems. We use new technologies such as infrared cameras, satellite tracking collars, and fecal DNA to understand them, just like meeting them all the time .

It's such a magical feeling.

Infrared photos, positioning tracks, and invisible DNA sequences are like letters traveling through parallel universes, and the desert cats are telling us their stories in the letters.

Even if we can't meet them up close, desert cats are still telling us their stories | Big Cats

Author: Kong Yueqiao

Editor: Little Towel, Mai Mai

Title image source: Big Cat