A Bornean clouded leopard and her two cubs were captured on camera strolling through a Malaysian forest reserve last week, a rare daytime sighting of the elusive animals in the wild.
Found only on the Southeast Asian islands of Borneo and Sumatra, the big cat species is known to zoologists as Neofelis diardi, with just 700 estimated to live in a habitat shrunk by poaching and deforestation.
“Seeing it in daytime is nearly unheard of, and never with its young,” said Michael Gordon, who filmed the animals cross a road and walk into bush in Deramakot in Sabah on the island of Borneo, where camera traps first spotted the cats in 2010.
“The Sunda clouded leopard is difficult across most of its range, but the last 3 years I have been coming to Deramakot, I have seen it a quite a few times,” the photographer told Reuters, using an alternative name for the species.
The animal’s habitat has shrunk by a tenth each year over the last two decades, the World Wildlife Fund said, hit by poaching and deforestation for commercial purposes.
Continue reading (Incl. Pic) at: Rare Bornean clouded leopards caught on camera
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