While walking to the wetland, I saw an Ocelot; my first wild cat sighting… ever. It was slowly walking down the road toward me and I thought it was a coyote (which I had seen a couple of days ago… along with two very young looking pups who were unable to run in a straight line away from the vehicle I was in). When it was about 75 meters away, I saw it’s long tail and immediately knew it was a cat. Unfortunately, my first reaction wasn’t to get my camera out, but to see whether or not I could get closer. I did, and at about 40 meters it noticed me, turned sideways and jumped into the dry forest. Here’s a poor picture of a dusty footprint.
Oh man. This is probably the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.
Yeah, I was definitely pumped, particularly because it’s the biggest of the ‘small’ cats, I believe. ‘Small’ cats basically excluding the puma and jaguar.
By the way, I hope your seminar went well. Only a couple more giant steps till graduation… at which time you need to fix your comments on Molecular Fossils.
Yeah, I need to try to fix that some time this summer. I imagine I can just copy and paste the relevant HTML from a different Blog template, but I haven’t screwed with it that much.