Project Update: May 2009

I arrived back here in Thailand to continue our search for wild fishing cats in December 2008 and a lot has happened since then. Shortly after getting to Thailand, I discovered a new site with resident fishing cats — Sam Roi Yod National Park and surrounding areas. This site is about 4 hours down the Malay Peninsula from Bangkok and is Thailand’s newest Ramsar Site.

After confirming that fishing cats had actually been collected by local residents here, we conducted some sign surveys followed by intensive camera trapping. This led to a live-trapping programme which has rapidly resulted in the successful collaring of 6 cats and the collection of biological samples that are undergoing genetic extraction and analysis and disease screening.

Communication is an important element of our project, so we’ve spent some time making a variety of interesting and hopefully useful information available at the project website which can be reached here: www.fishingcatproject.info