Are wild cats afraid of water?
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On this show, we take questions from curious kids all over the world just like you, and we find answers. Close your eyes and picture yourself at the start of a mountain trail on a late November day in Vermont. The path is covered with fallen leaves, the trees are bare, and big flakes of snow are starting to fall, making the world around you look just like a snow globe.

That's what it was like the day we started making this episode. - You know what, I brought plenty of water though and plenty of snacks and some emergency equipment like a lighter just in case. - How far are you taking us?

"Uh, maybe about a mile, mile and a half. It's not too far." That's Emily Carollo. She's a wildlife biologist, and she works at Panthera, a conservation and research organization dedicated to helping all the species of wildcats in the world.

So that includes our small cat species, some of which we find in North America, like our lynx and our bobcat. And some of our larger cat species, again, North American example would be our mountain lions. And where are we? Where are you taking us? So right now we are in the state of Vermont. We are in a wilderness area called Bread Loaf Wilderness Area. It is part of the Green Mountain National Forest.

And so right now we are heading up part of the Long Trail to go check out some animal sign that I found a couple days ago with a colleague of mine and talk about it. Let's go. All right. Melody and I met up to hike into this forested area with Emily to learn about wildcats. When you think of wildcats, you might be picturing the really big ones like lions, tigers, and jaguars that captivate a lot of our imagination.

But most of us don't live near lions, tigers, and jaguars. And yet, there are probably wild cats living closer to you right now than you might think. Let's take bobcats, for example. These elusive medium-sized cats live all over the United States, southern Canada, and parts of Mexico.

Their name, bobcat, refers to their stubby, bobbed tail. And they have distinctive pointy ears that end in a black tuft of fur right at the top. They weigh on average about 15 to 20 pounds, so they're nowhere near the size of a tiger or a lion. But they're strong hunters of small animals. In Canada and some far northern parts of the United States, you'd be lucky to spot a Canadian lynx, which is a slightly bigger cat.

And in the western parts of North America and in Florida, there are cougars, sometimes called mountain lions. They are much bigger. If you live on other continents, you have wild cats too. But you're unlikely to see them. Cats are stealthy and they know how to hide from people.

So, given that, we kind of guessed we weren't very likely to spot a bobcat while we were tromping through the woods with Emily, talking and making plenty of noise as we went. But that's okay. We weren't trying to spot a cat itself. Emily wanted to show us the forest because it's exactly the kind of habitat wild North American cats thrive in.

And when you know your habitat and you can start to look for animal signs, even if you don't actually see a cat, you can learn more about where they live and how to protect them. So all these little pinched off limbs here on this kind of low, this is a hobble bush, and I think we figured out it's also elderberry. Some of these are elderberry. And so these kind of little pinched off tops here are signs of deer brows, which is...

a super important prey animal the many different deer species in north america it's a super important prey animal for many different carnivore species including cats you know one of our north american cats are mountain lions and that medium-sized undulate deer species is definitely a main food source for them

obviously no mountain lions here but deer are still hunted by some species so just to put a fine point on it if you're out looking for signs of cats why is it helpful or important to see signs of deer yeah that's a really good point and it's because these animals all coexist with each other right they have a cycle of particularly for cats they're what's called obligate carnivores they only eat meat

And so they are predators. They depend on prey species. So for example, sort of known that

Canadian lynx in North America, which is another North American cat. They depend heavily on hare populations, you know, snowshoe hare populations, and they really, their populations will show ebbs and flows that coexist with or align with hare populations. They'll go up and down as hare populations go up and down. So it's important to know the whole landscape and get a better idea of what species you're seeing in the woods because they're all connected to one another.

And so it's really great to come out here and see signs that there are, you know, deer here, which helps again some predator species. We continued up the trail over a ridge, down, around, and through, and finally to a lower spot where Emily wanted to show us something. How cool is this? We've been walking through the woods and then we went off trail through this sort of boggy

mossy bit and now we've just come out to an opening. Yeah, so it's this probably an opening, I don't know, maybe 50 yards by 40 yards in size. And it's a wetland. I mean, the ground is very wet, but this is, you know, a higher elevation area.

wetland and obviously there's different kinds of plant species that grow around here that may attract different kinds of animal species even within a giant you know forested landscape you kind of get these pockets of unique ecosystems that support many different forms of wildlife so actually right here is what we think is the moose wallow so you see how it's just like a particularly

dug-in little wet spot here. It's like a miniature pond within the wetland. So sometimes these large undulate species, whether it be moose or elk, they'll, especially during the rut, which is the breeding season, they'll take their antlers and they'll dig into the ground and the boys will actually

pee on that ground and I'll dig their antlers and throw it all over their bodies. It must smell like, you know, the $300 cologne that people buy. And so that helps attract females. I was really glad Emily pointed out this special spot because I would never have known that what kind of looks like just a big puddle in the middle of a wetland

could be a spot that a moose made. And although we don't have any elk populations in Vermont, there are elk as nearby as Pennsylvania, and they love throwing mud. After looking at the wallow for a few minutes, we dipped back under the tree cover to get out of the wind and snow, and I asked Emily some of the questions you've sent us about the wild kind. My name is Benny, and I'm 60 years old. I live in Colorado Springs. How many species are there?

Cats are there. 40 wild cat species and then there's obviously the domestic cat species which makes it 41 total. These species are broken up into small cats and big cats. Typically the big five cats that we include are tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, and jaguars. And within that, are there different species of all of those big cats?

Yeah, so some of these species have what's called a subspecies, and typically that may mean they look very similar, right? For example, tigers, they are striped, they have their orange coloration, but sometimes they may be slightly smaller in size on average, they may have slightly different morphometrics, like slightly, I'm talking maybe a slightly different head shape, or they especially live in different areas of the world. That's really the most important thing there is that, for example,

For example, there's Siberian tigers that live in Russia and in parts of China in a much more cold environment. And then there's Sumatran tigers that live on the island of Sumatra. And it's more of a tropical climate. I was a little confused when Emily didn't mention mountain lions among the big cats. I wondered, are mountain lions a subspecies of lion or are they different? Well,

Well, so to be clear, lions in Africa are a totally different species than mountain lions in North America. Yeah, granted, mountain lions go by many different names. And so it may be a little confusing because sometimes people might say like lions when referring to mountain lions in North America. But they obviously look very different and are found on completely different continents. Although I think mountain lions are pretty darn big, they're not actually considered one of the big five cats. They're kind of the largest of the small cats.

And they go by lots of different names. Cougar, puma, catamount, painter, panther, and even sometimes mountain screamer. Here's a question from Roderick. How did big cats evolve into little house cats?

How did the cat that we keep in our house evolve from something like a lion or a tiger or evolve from the same place that all those other cats evolved from? The evolution of domestic animals is really a super cool process. Long story short, they believe the process was

These cats understood that humans often meant some sort of food around their civilizations, around their villages. And particularly we're talking about smaller rodents that may be attracted to things like grain stores or food stores. And so these wild cats would

and kind of figure out like, hey, if I hang around these humans, I get a lot of prey to eat, right? I get a lot of rodents to eat or maybe small birds, et cetera. And over time, people started to recognize like, oh, these wildcats actually kind of help us because they kill these pests that consume our stored food. And so maybe there was some level of,

encouraging these smaller wild cats to stick around their villages, their encampments, their civilizations, whatever it may be. And over time that led to these smaller cats becoming more and more and more trusting. And we're talking about thousands of years, by the way. Long story short, that eventually led to the domestication of this small cat species that led to our domestic cat species. You mentioned that there are five species that are called the big cats. And we have a question about why.

Hi, my name is Quinn and I'm six and a half years old and I live in Los Angeles in California. And my question is, why are cats like tigers, lions and, you know, jaguars called big cats?

Why are they called big cats? Are they just big? Yeah, so they're all big, which is great and super helpful. They're big, for sure, right? If you look at tigers, for example, they're the largest wildcat species in the world. But in addition to that, it's really mostly the line of evolution that they took. And so they are in a group called Panthera, right? And then they're under a subfamily heading of Pantherinae. And basically, they just had similar...

evolutionary processes that they're in the same part of the evolutionary tree. Because not necessarily all these cats have very similar characteristics other than being big, right? Or even where they're found. You know, for example, snow leopards can't roar, whereas our other big cats can. So it's

both the size but then mostly that evolutionary aspect and how they kind of evolved from older cat species that existed on the landscape many years ago. My name is Vera. I'm five years old. I live in Rochester, New York. And my question is why can cats live in different places? Like for example, the desert or rainforest?

How can cats live in so many different environments? The process of wildlife being able to adapt to the spaces that they're living in, in general, is really a cool process. And it's just all this

process of evolution and where these cats evolved, right? So we look at snow leopards living in very cold, mountainous areas of Asia, but then we can come to parts of Brazil where it's a lot more tropical. We have a rainforest and we have multiple cat species there like jaguars and mountain lions, but

Typically there's kind of two groups of wildlife that we talk about, specialists, right, that live in very specialized environments or unique environments, and they're very well adapted to living in those environments. Another one again would be snow leopards.

But then you get generalist species like mountain lions that literally live in boreal forests of Canada all the way down into Central America and South America into tropical rainforests and down into the Patagonia and Chile where we have these open kind of grassland mountainous ecosystems that get cold but also get hot, right? But are much more open in comparison to some of the forested areas that we may find mountain lions.

Yeah, that's pretty cool that they can be, they're different cats all over the place. So no matter where you're listening from, you probably have a wildcat species somewhere nearby you. Right. The only continent that doesn't have wildcats is Antarctica. And we don't have many listeners there. No, probably not. Now, if you have a house cat, it might use a litter box to go to the bathroom. And house cats often cover their poop after they've gone. Do other cats do that?

My name is Nico. I'm seven years old. I live in Casper, Wyoming. My question is, do tigers bury their poop? This is a super fun question. So in general, big cats tend not to really bury their poop too much. Now there is a behavioral action that cats do called a scrape. And so what they do is they'll actually take their hind paws and they'll push dirt with those hind paws. And this is not unusual for it to be associated with

them going to the bathroom either having a scat or going to the bathroom and peeing and so

It kind of is a mixed combination in that sense of when they do a scrape of typically some sort of territorial marking. And it may look like they're kind of burying their poop, but it's kind of like taking the ground and scraping a little bit. And actually cats have glands in between their digits or their fingers and they will scrape the ground. And that is not only leaving a scent from their scat or their urine, but then also leaving a scent from those glands in between their little digits there.

Why do cats chase mice?

There's two reasons why, if we're talking about our house cats, right? Why they chase mice. And this is also very applicable to wild cats as well, is food, right? They're predators, they're obligate carnivores. They hunt animals, like especially small cats, they'll hunt rodent species for them to consume. And then also,

Play. You know, play is a super important part of life for all wildlife species when it comes to learning how to interact with the environment. And when we talk about wild cat species and they're young, it's not unusual at all to see particularly siblings or even if it's just a single kitten or cub, you know, playing with older adults or maybe juveniles in the family group that they're with.

And play helps teach these young cats how to stalk and how to hide themselves and how to climb things and maybe escape danger or how to hunt, right? And how to take down prey that they eventually need to learn how to do so they can survive on their own. So it's consumption and eating things and also playing. We did get some questions about what cats eat. My name is Autumn and I'm five years old and I live in Chicago.

Do cats eat squirrels? Why do sand cats eat snakes? Jack. Ten. Ten.

Cats eat a variety of prey. And when you think about the vast amount of cat species around the world and the fact that they are predators, that means there's a lot of things on the menu for cats around the world. And it ranges all the way from, you know, here in North America, it could be voles and small birds to

elk and deer species and you know in other parts of the world we're looking at Africa it could be some you know smaller rodent or rabbit species all the way up to you know giraffes and buffalo I mean it is absolutely incredible the vast

differences in diet and kind of how many different species that wild cats will eat. Now some cat species, as we talked a little bit about before with Canadian lynx, become more of a specialist. They might really focus on certain types of prey species more than others. That doesn't mean they don't consume other animals, just they might be better at catching certain animals than others. But then if you look at some species, for example mountain lions, their prey diversity is absolutely vast.

To answer your question specifically, Autumn and Jack, yes, Autumn, cats do eat squirrels. House cats will sometimes eat squirrels if given a chance, especially the smaller red squirrels. And then bobcats and even sometimes mountain lions also like a squirrel dinner. And Jack, sand cats eat snakes because they have to eat what's available, and sometimes that means a snake.

These very small and very cute cats are fierce hunters who live in desert areas in parts of Africa and Central Asia. They can go a long time without needing water. And they sometimes hunt venomous snakes by hitting the snake on the head to stun it and then biting it in the neck to kill it. Coming up, more cool facts about wild cats. This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm.

We're out in the snowy woods in Vermont today with wildlife biologist Emily Carollo. She works for the nonprofit Panthera, which is a global wildcat conservation and research organization. And she's answering questions about fearless felines. Or maybe not always so fearless. Hi, my name's Mae. I live in BC, Canada. I'm 10 years old. And my question is, how come tigers like swimming but other kinds of cats don't?

Hi, my name is Olivia, and I am six years old, and I live in West Center, Washington. And my question is, why are cats afraid of water? Hello, my name is Valerie, and I am ten years old, and I live in the United States of America in Colorado. And my question is, why do many cats hate water? Thanks so much. Bye!

Hi, my name is Frankie. I am five years old and I live in Hoffman State, Illinois. And I want to know why do cats not like water? My name is Cora and I'm seven years old. I live in Georgia and my question is why do cats not like water?

Are cats afraid of water? Yeah. So, yes and no, right? Like, there are some cats that are... Some cat species that really are not huge fans of...

particularly like swimming in water, right? So cats, all cats drink water and they can be found, you know, drinking from various types of bodies of water. But some cats, like tigers, enjoy water a lot. Jaguars are known for being able to hunt in very watery areas and even catch snakes.

species like came in to consume which is pretty impressive and then other cats like fishing cats you know a small cat species in Asia they evolved

evolved around these wetland areas and so they learn to not only be in the water and be comfortable around it but also hunt in those areas as well. So some cats particularly you're probably talking about your domestic cat some domestic cats not a fan but there's also some domestic cats that seem to love water so I think it's a little bit of a preference thing but also how some of these cats evolved in the landscapes that they evolved in. My name is Iris. I live in Chicago and

I am five years old. Why do cats' eyes glow in the dark? Why do cats' eyes glow in the dark? Do we get to talk about one of my favorite stories?

vocabulary words, the tapetum lucidum here. I'm glad you said it because I was afraid I was going to mispronounce it. Yeah. So cats' eyes glow in the dark because they have a reflective lens in their eye and it's called the tapetum lucidum, if I'm pronouncing it correctly. And essentially what that helps cats do is see

better in low light conditions. And so light comes into the eye, it reflects off of that lens, and then it goes back out the eye and really helps cats be able to see in those low light times like dusk and dawn and at night.

Hi, my name is Jack and I'm 10 years old and I'm living in Wellington, New Zealand. And my question is, do cats have their own language and can talk to each other? Thank you, I love your show, bye. Are cats able to talk to each other and how do they do that? Yes, absolutely. And so it's really interesting because I would say cats communicate in three main ways. It's vocally, right? So there's

many different sounds that cats make they roar they purr they hiss they growl they you know snort they huff they do all these kinds of uh different sounds to communicate with one another you know probably are they meow right they kind of communicate that way so

Very similar to what we may hear in some aspects, maybe other than a roar from our domestic cats, right? From our cats that live in our house. But they also communicate through body language. It's a very important way for animals to communicate. And people actually communicate a lot through body language as well, whether or not we realize it. And...

And lastly, using scent. And so it's not unusual for wildcat species to do various forms of marking. We talked about scraping before and how they'll use their hind feet to kind of, you know, scrape the ground and leave scent with those glands that are in those paws and typically in combination with urine or feces.

Or they'll spray, particularly large cats, they love to spray on items, especially high up to try and attract maybe females or for females to kind of communicate that they're ready to have kittens with the males that are in the area, right? Or to also mark territory and say, hey,

This is my home and I don't want anybody else in it type of deal. So they use really those three main forms of communication is vocal, body language and using scent. Hi, my name is Ronan. I'm six years old. I live in New York City. Why do some cats roar and why do some purr? Who can purr and who can roar? Great question. I'm so...

The species that can roar are lions, leopards, jaguars, and tigers. Can they all purr? Can all cats purr? So the cats that can roar can't purr. But the cats that can't roar can purr.

Jasper I'm I'm in second grade I live from Long Beach Washington I'm almost eight years old and my question is what are some ways to get a cat to trust you because there is this white cat that lives on my neighbor's house that I really want to trust me but it's scary me

We would never recommend that you pressure an animal or harass an animal, but what are some of the things that you can do that won't make an animal scared? And Jasper's animal is presumably a house cat, not a wild cat. But how can you observe an animal and start to gain its trust? Yeah, so I think...

to make sure again, we're talking about really two different kinds of animals, domestic animals and wild animals. And when it comes to wildlife and wild animals,

It's actually not a bad thing that they don't trust humans. You know, unfortunately, humans can be a big source of mortality for wildlife, and this can actually cause a lot of problems for some species that encourage wildlife around human areas and may end up resulting in both injury to the wild animal and to people. And so it's actually a good thing if wildlife does not trust us. And one of the ways that we can help

animals remain wary and wild animals remain weary is to always respect them, always give wildlife plenty of space. But we're talking about our domestic cat friends. I actually just experienced this myself a little over a year ago where we had a younger kitten and her mom running around our apartment complex when I was living in Pennsylvania. And one of the ways that you can get domestic cats to trust you is you can feed them.

Sometimes the way to a kitty's heart is through their stomach. So you can use things like treats or food to encourage them to hang around the area that you want them to be in. But also recognize that it's not unusual for cats that may not have had too much exposure to people to be super weary of people as well. And time is a really just big one. And so making sure that you're always giving a positive experience for your domestic cat friends, not wild cat friends around you, and they'll eventually begin to trust you. And you know what?

It worked for me. We now own that little kitten that was running around and she is an absolute house panther, but she loves to be pet.

So, Emily, we're here in the wilderness in Vermont, and we've hiked up and hiked down and gotten to this boggy, marshy area, and you've shown us the signs of potentially moose, maybe bear. We've seen deer poop. One thing we have not seen is any cat of any kind. Why did you bring us here when we haven't even seen any cats? Yeah, so...

most cat species are incredibly elusive they're really good and not being seen because they don't really want to be seen so here in Vermont we have two native cat species one far more rare than the other and actually found a little bit further up in northern Vermont which is the Canadian lynx and then we also have bobcats but even though bobcats are

pretty common, they have healthy populations throughout the Northeast. They're still really hard to see. They're really good at avoiding people. So I wanted to kind of bring us to this landscape because

There are native cats of Vermont that live in these woods that you can occasionally find sign for when you're looking for it, but also because there was a third native cat species that lived here in the Northeast, and that is mountain lions. They're also called pumas, catamounts, cougars. They go by many different names because they're found or historically were found throughout a vast area of North and South America. So encountering many different people that called them by many different names.

And one of the projects that I'm working on is looking at trying to see if wild mountain lions can come back to the eastern United States. You know, large cats like mountain lions fill very important niches.

So right now I'm working on a project that's looking at the possibility of this native cat that was once here to come back. And either through the form of natural recolonization, which we've done, which means that cats come back on their own, right? Into places that they formerly existed on the landscape. And we've done some research that

unfortunately does not look very promising for that. Um, but there's also always the possibility of humans doing something called a reintroduction and bringing cats back on, um, you know, through human activity. Right. And, um,

Essentially, this is a very interesting topic, but it's also not new to the Northeast. Believe it or not, there were a number of species reintroduced to many northeastern states, including fisher, including bald eagle, and some that had populations reinforced because they were so low. Some of the common ones that we see, white-tailed deer, wild turkey, river otter.

beaver, I mean all of these species that we see today pretty frequently and may have very healthy populations throughout many Northeast states.

were actually reintroduced or reinforced meaning we took animals from another part of the range typically out west or in Canada and brought in extra individuals to add to the population that was struggling here in the northeast. So it's really kind of cool to come to an environment where we know mountain lions once walked you know at some point and we have an opportunity to maybe try and fix some of the mistakes in the past that humans made and be really great to be able to say sorry and

and bring them back. Wow, that would be really something if mountain lions were reintroduced, brought back to the northeastern United States. There's no reintroduction plan in motion at the moment, and lots of people would want to weigh in with very strong feelings on both sides as that plan progresses. But it's pretty cool to walk through the same woods that mountain lions once called home and imagine these large predators maybe coming back someday.

Thanks to Emily Carollo of Panthera for sharing her knowledge and answering all of your wildcat questions. That's it for this episode. If you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memos. Then email the file to questions at butwhykids.org.

But Why is produced by... Oh, wait! Remember at the beginning of the episode when I told you to close your eyes and pretend you were at the trailhead on a beautiful snowy day in Vermont? I never told you to open your eyes again! I'm sure none of you peeked during this whole episode, so go ahead and open your eyes now. But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public.

Joey Palumbo is our video producer. If you want more But Why, we produce a short video episode called a But Why Bite. Every week we don't release a podcast episode. So you can get But Why every week if you want. Our latest episode explores why T-Rexes have such short arms. Go to YouTube and find But Why Kids and subscribe to our channel.

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