Teetering over an arid cliff race above the sprawling Chilean capital, Bernardo Segura reviews the footage from the camera trap and lets out a yell of excitement as the images reveal a flickering striped tail. On the screen displaying the conservationist’s latest video capture is an Andean cat – the most endangered feline in the Americas. Looking a little like a miniature snow leopard, the 4kg (9lb) male enters the frame […]. Segura is excited for many reasons. With a shrinking population of fewer than 1,400 mature Andean cats left, any sighting is good. But this one heralds a signal of hope in a different way for the species and the conservationists battling against the cats’ extinction because it confirms a new population living close to humans – on the very edge of Santiago, a city of eight million people. “We have never found a population so close to a large city before,” says Segura. […]
Until now, Andean cats were believed to live only in extremely remote rocky terrain far from cities. But after seeing high numbers of the cats’ favourite prey – rodents from the chinchilla family called mountain vizcachas – around the popular Parque Mahuida nature reserve on the edge of Santiago, Segura trusted a hunch and in February placed camera traps on a terraced precipice above the neighbourhood of La Reina, about 2.5km, or 1.5 miles, from Santiago. In July, he had his first images of an Andean cat. Since then, his camera has taken about 40 more. “So far, we have identified at least three individual adults passing continually, suggesting this is the core of their territory and not just a chance encounter,” says Segura, who volunteers for the non-profit organisation Andean Cat Alliance (AGA), a coalition of conservationists who coordinate their efforts across Chile, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia. […]
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This is hard to find in their other known habitats – huge territories that span the higher Andean peaks, and on the northern part of the Patagonian steppe in Argentina. Previous research had identified five highly fragmented populations between the four countries, stretching north to south between Peru and Argentina. […]
Some of the greatest threats to the cats come from extractive industries around the Andes, such as mining, quarrying and fracking, which destroy their habitat and consume massive amounts of water, draining the animals’ sources dry. Segura published a paper in May on another discovery of Andean cats, in Valparaíso, a mountainous coastal region north of Santiago city. In the paper he warns of the threat posed by plans for a large-scale open pit mine called the Vizcachitas mining project, which is being developed in the area. […] The Andean cat has also suffered from its low profile, even among experts, says Palacios. “The Andean cat has been a very unknown species for a long time. A lot of our work has focused on pushing for them to be more considered in the global conservation agenda. “It was a species that was disappearing through our fingers,” she adds. “Even people who know a lot about cats didn’t know about them, but if feels like that is changing.”
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Headline, text, images, map, and captions published by: Liam Miller. “Most endangered cat in Americas found living on outskirts of Chilean capital.” The Guardian. 10 December 2021.
