Yvonne de Jong and I are preparing a short article that reviews what we know about the distribution of the African golden cat in Kenya and Tanzania.  The manuscript is 95% complete and will be submitted to JEANH in about 1 week.  Before doing so, however, I  thought that I would first check around a bit more for additional records of encounters with golden cat in Kenya and Tanzania.  At this time the summary table in the manuscript holds about 35 reports.  We'd like to add to that, and make the table as complete and up-to-date as is reasonably possible. 

 

We have a map that depicts the locations of all of the ca. 35 golden cat encounters.  This map will be published with the article.  Yvonne has created "GoldenCatBase''...a database that summarizes the available reports.  This database will be available at www.wildsolutions.nl  for all to use...and kept up-to-date.  

 

So, I write to you now to ask if you have any encounters with golden cats in Kenya or Tanzania that you would be willing to contribute to the database and to the article?....or if you know of anyone who has?  If so, we'd like to include the following details in both the table and the database:

 

- Date of encounter:

 

- Locality (coordinates if available):

 

- Altitude: 

 

- Vegetation type:

 

- Colour of the pelage (reddish, black, grey, chocolate, etc.):

 

- Full name(s) of the observers:

 

Any other details that you can provide concerning the encounter would be appreciated.  If you do not have all of the above information, please send us what you can recall.  Dates, altitude, localities might be rough approximations...especially for ancient encounters...but that is far better than nothing.

 

Thank you for any information!

 

Best regards,

 

Tom

  

Thomas M. Butynski, PhD
Director, King Khalid Wildlife Research Center
Saudi Wildlife Authority & Zoological Society of London
P. O. Box 61681
Riyadh 11575
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Mobile: 00-966-559-612-499
E-mail: tbutynski@aol.com