Ocelot photo, film crews, and jaguar sighting!

Lots of excitement in the past few days, particularly in the cat department. You may recall that during my best day ever I encountered an ocelot kitten trying to Simba-roar at me. Shortly thereafter, Jackie and Greg Willis, the researchers in charge of the Barro Colorado Island Mammal Census, placed a camera near the site and check out what they found!

Photo credit: Jackie and Greg Willis

These are photos of the mother, who has shown up on the cameras before. Ocelots all have distinctive spot patterns so you can identify each one individually. All the ones that show up on the census cameras have names, though at the moment I can’t remember hers.

There also happens to be a film crew here planning to get footage of ocelots hunting for a new series airing on BBC in 2015 entitled “The Hunt.” They also decided to set up some cameras at the site in hopes of catching the cats hunting spiny rats. Quite a popular spot! 

Finally, over the weekend there was a jaguar sighting on the island! There are not typically resident jaguars on the island, though on occasion they swim across from the mainland. The first one ever spotted on the island showed up in the census around 30 years ago, and it took 25 years for the for them to show up on the cameras. The one that was seen over the weekend was melanistic (appears all black), which is rare but known to occur in jaguars on the mainland.

Melanistic jaguar (not the actual one seen). You can still see the spots faintly.