Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
26 rusty-spotted kittens are reunited with mothers
MUMBAI: After numerous instances of leopard cubs being reunited with their mothers in the wild in Maharashtra, a team of researchers and wildlife rehabilitators managed to successfully reunite 26 rusty-spotted kittens with their mothers over six years (2014-2019) in the state’s Junnar forest division.
The achievements of the team, part of wild animal conservation group Wildlife SOS, were published in a research paper in the Journal of Threatened Taxa on Monday. This is the first report from India on multiple reunion efforts for this cat species.
All reunions were carried out with the state forest department. “There is a large population of rusty-spotted cats across Junnar, Ambegaon and Shirur due to the favourable habitat for these species home to sufficient water and hiding places in sugarcane fields. This year, we rescued and reunited three such kittens with their mothers,” said
JR Gowda, deputy conservator of forest, Junnar.
Authors of the study included wildlife veterinarians and researchers Ajay Deshmukh, Yaduraj Khadpekar, Mahendra Dhore, and MV Baijuraj, some of whom have spent almost two decades in leopard conservation and conflict management.
The rusty-spotted cats are the smallest cat species in the world protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and listed as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. With no specific conservation action plan for the habitat of these cats or an official census, IUCN estimates a 75% decline in their habitat over the next 10 years.
Kittens are generally separated from their mothers during the night considering their nocturnal activity pattern, during sugarcane cutting, their mothers stray in search of food or human disturbances. All kittens were examined for injuries followed by a medical check before the reunion process.
The study concluded that such reunion protocols could be replicated for kittens or cubs of other wild cats. “The rusty-spotted cat is very rare to spot in the wild and is a hidden jewel in Indian biodiversity. We had the opportunity to successfully rescue and reunite these kittens with their mothers and have utilised the same reunion model that we follow for reuniting leopards cubs with their mothers,” said Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder, Wildlife SOS.
All 26 kittens found in fields, aged between 30 and 60 days. “All reunions happened on the evening of the same day as the mother cats were in the vicinity where the kittens were found, and presumably returned on hearing the kittens’ sounds,” one of the authors said.