The 'leopard cubs' caught in Narsingdi's Shibpur were rare leopard cats

The kittens caught twice in Shibpur, Narsingdi, that local people took for leopard cubs were in fact rare leopard cats. Wildlife conservationist and writer Sarwar Pathan has described the episodes in Prothom Alo. Wildlife experts Reza Khan and Monirul Hasan Khan both confirmed, from the photos and videos he sent them, that the animals were leopard cats.

The first case was on 2 March, when a kitten was caught in Srishtigarh village in Jashor union of Shibpur and social media spread word that a leopard had been seen. Nigar Sultana, a wildlife inspector at the Forest Department, told Pathan the kitten had been rescued and released near where its mother was.

The second was on 15 August in Jamgarh village of Joynagar union, where a man named Murad Hossain found three kittens while working in a turmeric field next to his house and took them home. Pathan took the caged kittens back to the edge of the turmeric field, and at that moment the mother was seen running off. Released under a nearby bush, the kittens called for a while and then fell silent: they had found her.

The leopard cat is Bangladesh's smallest wild cat. A nocturnal, tree-dwelling hunter, it is found in the Sundarbans and the forests of greater Chattogram, Sylhet and the Garo hills. It looks like a small leopard, with black spots on a yellowish-brown coat and a white chest and belly, feeds mainly on small birds, rats, squirrels, reptiles and frogs, and spends the day on branches, in tree hollows or in dense bush.

Fishing cats caught in villages are often mistaken for leopard cubs, but the Shibpur kittens were neither fishing cats nor jungle cats, Pathan writes. Leopard cats were once found in many parts of the country; today they are almost nowhere outside the Sundarbans and a few hill forests.

In Pathan's view, this part of Shibpur, known locally as the 'hill area', was once home to many wild animals, and the leopard cats are the last of them. Their survival in a densely populated district is encouraging, he says, but it needs proper research, and the Forest Department has been told.

Photo: Abujoy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Source: Prothom Alo