Caturday felid trifecta: Beach vacations for cat lovers; two cat memes; and the rare Chinese mountain cat

Do you love cats and beaches? Then site Coastal Living has an article just for you (click on the screenshot):

The sites include Amsterdam, Key West, the “cat islands” of Aoshima and Tashirojima in Japan, San Francisco (that’s bogus as it’s based on two cat cafes and a cat museum), Tampa, Florida, San Diego, California, Mykonos in Greece, Seattle, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Malta.

But one could go on much longer. Other cat towns I love include Paris, Plovdiv, Bulgaria (not on the water), and any village on the coast of the Peloponnese (just sit down at a seaside restaurant and they’ll come). And how the deuce could they forget Istanbul???

Here are some scenes from an Atlantic article on the cat island of Aosima:

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Here are two cat memes, the first sent by Heather Hastie and the second by reader Merilee. Note that Freddie Mercury had a cat named Jerry. If only he’d given it the last name “Coyne”!

This is almost certainly posed, but who cares?

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From Birding Beijing we have some information on the rare Chinese Mountain Cat, Felis beiti. In truth, I didn’t even know of this species’ existence! While Wikipedia notes that it was classified as a subspecies of the “regular” wildcat (Felis silvestris beiti), it now appears to be a named full species, and the only cat species endemic to China. Wikipedia says this about it:

The Chinese mountain cat is endemic to China and lives on the north-eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. It was recorded only in eastern Qinghai and north-western Sichuan. It inhabits high-elevation steppe grassland, alpine meadow, alpine shrubland and coniferous forest edges between 2,500 and 5,000 m (8,200 and 16,400 ft) elevation. It has not been confirmed in true desert or heavily forested mountains.

The first photographs of a wild Chinese mountain cat were taken by camera traps during light snow in May 2007 at 3,570 m (11,710 ft) altitude in Sichuan. These photographs were taken in rolling grasslands and brush-covered mountains. One individual was observed and photographed in May 2015 in the Ruoergai grasslands. In 2018, employees of the Shanshui Conservation Center found a den of a mother cat and her two kittens in Yushu, and captured them over three days using a camera trap.

Some photos and videos from Birding Beijing, which, in an article published only 8 days ago, adds this:

It was therefore with some excitement that I heard about the discovery of an active den while in the Valley of the Cats, near Yushu, in mid-September and was fortunate and privileged to be taken to the site by the finder, local ShanShui employee Dawa.

Dawa had been working with Han Xuesong, ShanShui’s project lead on another Tibetan Plateau species – Black-necked Crane – when he spotted movement alongside the road.  Thinking the animal was a Tibetan Fox, common in the area, he grabbed his camera and took a series of photographs.  It was only when he later looked through the images that he realised he had photographed not a Tibetan Fox but a cat..  and after circulating the images to colleagues at ShanShui, it was soon confirmed as a Chinese Mountain Cat, a poorly known and rarely seen felid.

On returning to the site, the ShanShui staff were delighted to find not one cat but three – a mother with two young kittens.  They had found an active den – possibly the first ever discovered in the wild.  The location, close to a road, meant that the cats appeared to be relatively used to seeing people and so, not long after, while the mother cat was away from the den hunting for prey, Dawa and Xuesong placed a camera trap close to one of the three entrances to the den (thought to be an old Himalayan Marmot hole).  The resulting footage is spectacular and, courtesy of ShanShui Conservation Center, a compilation can be seen below.

There’s a swell 1:41 video at the site courtesy of the ShanShui Conservation Centre; click on the screenshot to get to some adorable Mountain Cat kitten action:

h/t: Tom, Ben