Jane: This is But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids from Vermont
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions
from curious kids all over the world, just like you, and we
find answers. Close your eyes and picture yourself at the
start of a mountain trail on a late November day in Vermont.
The path is covered with fallen leaves. The trees are bare, and
big flakes of snow are starting to fall, making the world around
you look just like a snow globe. That's what it was like the day
we started making this episode.
Emily Carollo: You know what? I brought plenty of water, though,
and plenty of snacks, and, you know, some emergency equipment,
like a lighter, just in case.
Jane: How far are you taking us?
Emily Carollo: About a mile, mile and a half. It's not too
far.
Jane: That's Emily Carollo. She's a wildlife biologist, and
she works at Panthera, a conservation and research
organization dedicated to helping all the species of wild
cats in the world.
Emily Carollo: So that includes our small cat species, some of
which we find in North America, like our lynx and our bobcat,
and some of our larger cat species, again, North American
example would be our mountain lions.
Jane: And where are we? Where are you taking us?
Emily Carollo: So right now, we are in the state of Vermont. We
are in a wilderness area called Bread Loaf Wilderness Area. It
is part of the Green Mountain National Forest. And so right
now, we are heading up part of the Long Trail to go check out
some animal sign that I found a couple days ago with a colleague
of mine and talk about it.
Jane: Let's go.
Unknown: All right.
Jane: Melody and I met up to hike into this forested area
with Emily to learn about wild cats. When you think of wild
cats, you might be picturing the really big ones, like lions,
tigers and jaguars, that captivate a lot of our
imagination, but most of us don't live near lions, tigers
and jaguars. And yet, there are probably wild cats living closer
to you right now than you might think. Let's take bobcats, for
example. These elusive, medium-sized cats live all over
the United States, southern Canada and parts of Mexico.
Their name, bobcat, refers to their stubby, bobbed tail, and
they have distinctive pointy ears that end in a black tuft of
fur right at the top. They weigh, on average, about 15 to
20 pounds, so they're nowhere near the size of a tiger or a
lion, but they're strong hunters of small animals. In Canada and
some far northern parts of the United States, you'd be lucky to
spot a Canadian lynx, which is a slightly bigger cat. And in the
western parts of North America and in Florida, there are
cougars, sometimes called mountain lions. They are much
bigger. If you live on other continents, you have wild cats
too, but you're unlikely to see them. Cats are stealthy, and
they know how to hide from people. So given that, we kind
of guessed we weren't very likely to spot a bobcat while we
were tromping through the woods with Emily, talking and making
plenty of noise as we went. But that's okay. We weren't trying
to spot a cat itself. Emily wanted to show us the forest
because it's exactly the kind of habitat wild North American cats
thrive in. And when you know your habitat and you can start
to look for animal signs, even if you don't actually see a cat,
you can learn more about where they live and how to protect
them.
Emily Carollo: So all these little pinched off limbs here,
and this kind of low,,..this is a hobblebush. I think we figured
out it's also elderberry. Some of these are elderberry. And so
these kind of little pinched off tops here are signs of deer
browse, which is a super important prey animal, the many
different deer species in North America, super important prey
animal for many different carnivore species, including
cats. You know, one of our North American cats are mountain
lions, and that medium sized undulate deer species is
definitely a main food source for them. Obviously, no mountain
lions here, but deer are so hunted by some species.
Jane: So just to put a fine point on it, if you're out
looking for signs of cats, why is it helpful or important to
see signs of deer?
Emily Carollo: Yeah, that's a really good point, and it's
because these animals all coexist with each other, right?
They have a cycle of, particularly for cats, they're
what's called obligate carnivores. They only eat meat,
and so they are predators. They depend on prey species. So for
example, sort of known that Canadian lynx in North America,
which is another North American cat, they depend heavily on hare
populations, snowshoe hare populations, and their
populations will show ebb and flows that coexist with or align
with hare populations. They'll go up and down as hare
populations go up and down. So it's important to know the whole
landscape and get a better idea of what species you're seeing in
the woods, because they're all connected to one another. And so
it's really great to come out here and see signs that there
are, you know, deer here, which helps, again, some predator
species.
Jane: We continued up the trail, over a ridge, down, around and
through and finally to a lower spot where Emily wanted to show
us something.
Emily Carollo: How cool is this?
Jane: We've been walking through the woods, and then we went off
trail through this sort of boggy, mossy bit, and now we've
just come out to an opening.
Emily Carollo: Yeah, so it's this probably an opening, I
don't know, maybe 50 yards by 40 yards in size. And it's a
wetland. I mean, the ground is very wet, but this is, you know,
a higher elevation wetland. And obviously there's different
kinds of plant species that grow around here that may attract
different kinds of animal species. Even within a giant,
you know, forested landscape, you kind of get these pockets of
unique ecosystems that support many different forms of
wildlife. So actually, right here is what we think is a moose
wallow. So you see how it's just like a particularly dug in
little wet spot here? It's like a miniature pond within the
wetland. So sometimes these large underlying species,
whether it be moose or elk, especially during the rut, which
is the breeding season, they'll take their antlers and they'll
dig into the ground, and the boys will actually pee on that
ground, and they'll dig their antlers and throw it all over
their bodies, and must smell like, you know, the $300 cologne
that people buy, and so that helps attract females.
Unknown: I was really glad Emily pointed out this special spot,
because I would never have known that what kind of looks like
just a big puddle in the middle of a wetland could be a spot
that a moose made. And although we don't have any elk
populations in Vermont, there are elk as nearby as
Pennsylvania, and they love throwing mud. After looking at
the wallow for a few minutes, we dipped back under the tree cover
to get out of the wind and snow, and I asked Emily some of the
questions you've sent us about cats--the wild kind.
Benny: My name is Benny, and I'm 6 years old. I live in Colorado
Springs. How many species of cats are there?
Emily Carollo: Forty wild cat species, and then there's
obviously the domestic cat species, which makes it 41
total. These species are broken up into small cats and big cats.
Typically the big five cats that we include are tigers, lions,
leopards, snow leopards and jaguars.
Jane: And within that, are there different species of all of
those big cats?
Unknown: Yeah, so some of these species have what's called a
subspecies, and typically that may mean they look very similar,
right? For example, tigers, they are striped. They have their
orange coloration, but sometimes it they may be slightly smaller
in size. On average, they may have slightly different, like,
morphometrics, like slightly. I'm talking maybe a slightly
different head shape, or they especially live in different
areas of the world. That's really the most important thing
there is that, for example, there's Siberian tigers that
live in Russia and in parts of China and a much more cold
environment. And then there's Sumatran tigers that live on the
island of Sumatra, and it's more of a tropical climate.
I was a little confused when Emily didn't mention mountain
lions among the big cats. I wondered, are mountain lions a
subspecies of lion, or are they different?
Emily Carollo: Well, so to be clear, lions in Africa are a
totally different species and mountain lions in North America.
Yeah, granted, mountain lions go by many different names, and so
it may be a little confusing, because sometimes people might
say like lions when referring to mountain lions in North America,
but they obviously look very different and are found are
completely different continents.
Jane: Yeah. Although I think mountain lions are pretty darn
Roderik: How did big cats evolve into little house cats?
big, they're not actually considered one of the big five
cats. They're kind of the largest of the small cats, and
Jane: How did the cat that we keep in our house evolve from
they go by lots of different names: cougar, puma, catamount,
painter, panther and even sometimes mountain screamer.
something like a lion or a tiger, or evolve from the same
Here's a question from Roderik.
place that all those other cats evolved from?
Unknown: The evolution of domestic animals is really a
super cool process. Long story short, they believe the process
was these cats understood that humans often meant some sort of
food around their civilizations, around their villages, and
particularly we're talking about smaller rodents that may be
attracted to things like grain stores or food stores. And so
these wild cats would realize and kind of figure out like,
hey, if I hang around these humans. I get a lot of prey to
eat, right? I get a lot of rodents to eat, or maybe small
birds, et cetera. And over time, people started to recognize
like, oh, these wild cats actually kind of help us,
because they kill these pests that consume our store food. And
so maybe there was some level of encouraging these smaller wild
cats to stick around their villages, their encampments,
their civilizations, whatever it may be. And over time, that led
to these smaller cats becoming more and more and more trusting.
And we're talking about thousands of years, by the way.
Long story short, that eventually led to the
domestication of this small cat species. That led to our
domestic cat species.
Jane: You mentioned that there are five species that are called
the big cats, and we have a question about why.
Quinn: Hi, my name is Quinn, and I'm six and a half years old,
and I live in Los Angeles in California. And my question is,
why are cats like tigers, lions and, you know, jaguars called
big cats?
Jane: Why are they called big cats? Are they just big?
Unknown: Yeah, so they're all big, which is great and super
helpful. They're big, for sure, right? If you look at tigers,
for example, they're the largest wild cat species in the world.
But in addition to that, it's really mostly the line of
evolution that they took. And so they are in a group called
panthera, right? And then they're under a subfamily
heading of Pantherinae. And basically they just had similar
evolutionary processes that they're in the same part of the
evolutionary tree. Because not necessarily all these cats have
very similar characteristics, other than being big, right, or
even where they're found. You know, for example, snow leopards
can't roar, whereas our other big cats can. So it's both the
size, but then mostly that evolutionary aspect and how they
kind of evolved from older cat species that existed on the
landscape many years ago.
Vera: My name is Vera. I'm five years old. I live in Rochester,
New York, and my question is why can cats live in different
places, like, for example, the desert or rainforest?
Jane: How can cats live in so many different environments?
Unknown: The process of wildlife being able to adapt to the
spaces that they're living in, in general, is really a cool
process, and it's just all this process of evolution and where
these cats evolved, right? So we look at snow leopards living in
very cold, mountainous areas of Asia, but then we can come to
parts of Brazil where it's a lot more tropical. We have our
rainforests, and we have multiple cat species there, like
jaguars and mountain lions. But typically, there's kind of two
groups of wildlife that we talk about, specialists, right, that
live in very specialized environments or unique
environments, and they're very well adapted to living in those
environments. Another one, again, would be snow leopards.
But then you get generalist species like mountain lions that
literally live in boreal forests of Canada all the way down into
Central America and South America, into tropical
rainforests and down into the Patagonia and Chile where we
have these open, kind of grassland, mountainous
ecosystems that get cold but also get hot, right? But are
much more open in comparison to some of the forested areas that
we may find mountain lions.
Jane: Yeah, that's pretty cool that they can be...they're
different cats all over the place. So no matter where you're
listening from, you probably have a wild cat species
somewhere nearby you.
Unknown: Right. The only continent that doesn't have wild
cats is Antarctica.
Jane: And we don't have many listeners there.
Emily Carollo: No, probably not.
Unknown: Now, if you have a house cat, it might use a litter
box to go to the bathroom, and house cats often cover their
poop after they've gone. Do other cats do that?
Niko: My name is Niko. I'm seven years old. I live in Casper,
Wyoming. My question is, do tigers bury their poop?
Unknown: This was a super fun question. So in general, big
cats tend not to really bury their poop too much. Now, there
is a behavioral action that cats do called a scrape. And so what
they do is they'll actually take their hind paws and they'll push
dirt with those hind paws. And this is not unusual for it to be
associated with them going to the bathroom, either having a
scat, or going to the bathroom and peeing. And so it kind of is
a mixed combination, in that sense, of when they do a scrape
of typically some sort of territorial marking. And it may
look like they're kind of burying their poop, but it's
kind of like taking the ground and scraping a little bit. And
actually, cats have glands in between their digits or their
fingers, and they will scrape the ground, and that is not only
leaving a scent from their scat or their urine, but then also
leaving a scent from those glands In between their their
little digits there.
Samuel: Hello my name is Samuel why do cats chase mice?
Jane: Why do cats chase mice?
Unknown: There's two reasons why, if we're talking about our
house cats, right, why they chase mice. And this is also
very applicable to wild cats as well, is food, right? They're
predators. They're obligate carnivores. They hunt animals.
Like especially small cats, they'll hunt rodent species for
them to consume. And then also play. You know, play is a super
important part of life for all wildlife species when it comes
to learning how to interact with the environment. And when we
talk about wild cat species and their young, it's not unusual at
all to see, particularly siblings, or even if it's just a
single kitten or cub, you know, playing with older adults or
maybe juveniles in the family group that they're with. And
play helps teach these young cats how to stalk and how to
hide themselves, and how to climb things and maybe escape
danger, or how to hunt, right, and how to take down prey that
they eventually need to learn how to do so they can survive on
their own. So it's consumption and eating things and also
playing.
Jane: We did get some questions about what cats eat.
Autumn: My name is Autumn, and I'm five years old, and I live
in Chicago. Do cats eat squirrels?
Jack's adult: Okay, what's your question?
Jack: Why do sand cats eat snakes?
Jack's adult: And what's your name?
Jack: Jack.
Jack's adult: How old are you?
Jack: 10!
Jack's adult: No.
Jack: 10.
Jack's adult: Five. We're five.
Unknown: Cats eat a variety of prey. And when you think about
the vast amount of cat species around the world and the fact
that they are predators, that means there's a lot of things on
the menu for cats around the world. And it ranges all the way
from, you know, here in North America it could be voles and
small birds to elk and deer species. And, you know, in other
parts of the world, looking at Africa, it could be some, you
know, smaller rodent or rabbit species, all the way up to
giraffes and buffalo. I mean, it is absolutely incredible the
vast differences in diet and kind of how many different
species that wild cats will eat. Now, some cat species, as we
talked a little bit about before with Canadian lynx, become more
of a specialist. They might really focus on certain types of
prey species more than others. That doesn't mean they don't
consume other animals, just they might be better at catching
certain animals than others. But then, if you look at some
species, for example, mountain lions, their prey diversity is
absolutely vast.
Jane: To answer your questions, specifically, Autumn and Jack,
yes, Autumn cats do eat squirrels! House cats will
sometimes eat squirrels if given a chance, especially the smaller
red squirrels, and then bobcats and even sometimes mountain
lions also like a squirrel dinner. And Jack, sand cats eat
snakes because they have to eat what's available, and sometimes
that means a snake. These very small and very cute cats are
fierce hunters who live in desert areas in parts of Africa
and Central Asia. They can go a long time without needing water,
and they sometimes hunt venomous snakes by hitting the snake on
the head to stun it and then biting it in the neck to kill
it. Coming up more cool facts about wild cats.
BREAK: BREAK
Jane: This is But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids. I'm Jane
Lindholm. We're out in the snowy woods in Vermont today with
wildlife biologist Emily Carollo. She works for the
nonprofit Panthera, which is a global wild cat conservation and
research organization, and she's answering questions about
fearless felines, or maybe not always so fearless.
Mae: Hi, my name is Mae. I live in BC, Canada. I'm 10 years old,
and my question is, how come tigers like swimming, but other
kinds of cats don't?
Olivia: Hi, my name is Olivia, and I am six years old, and I
live in Westcenter Washington, and my question is, why are cats
afraid of water?
Valerie: Hello. My name is Valerie, and I am 10 years old,
Frankie: Hi. My name is Frankie. I am five years old, and I live
and I live in the United States of America, in Colorado. And my
in hogmana, states, Illinois, and I want to know, why do cats
question is, why do many cats hate water? Thanks so much. Bye.
not like water?
Kora: My name is Kora, and I'm seven years old. I live in
Georgia, and my question is, why do cats not like water?
Jane: Are cats afraid of water?
Unknown: Yeah, so yes and no, right? Like, there are some cats
that are...some cat species that really are not huge fans of
particularly, like swimming in water, right? So all cats drink
water, and they can be found, you know, drinking from various
types of bodies of water. But some cats, like tigers, enjoy
water a lot. Jaguars are known for being able to hunt in very
watery areas and even catch species like caiman to consume,
which is pretty impressive. And then other cats, like fishing
cats, you know, a small cat species in Asia, they evolved
around these wetland areas, and so they learned to not only be
in the water and be comfortable around it, but also hunt in
those areas as well. So some cats, particularly, you probably
talking about your domestic cat, some domestic cats, not a fan,
but there's also some domestic cats that seem to love water. So
I think it's a little bit of a preference thing, but also how
some of these cats evolved in the landscapes that they evolved
in.
Iris: My name is Iris. I live in Chicago, and I am five years
old. Why do cats eyes glow in the dark?
Jane: Why do cats eyes glow in the dark? Do we get to talk
about one of my favorite vocabulary words--the tapetum
Unknown: I'm glad you said it, because I was afraid I was gonna
lucidum--here?
mispronounce it. Yeah, so cat's eyes glow in the dark because
they have a reflective lens in their eye, and it's called the
tapetum lucidum, if I'm pronouncing it correctly. And
essentially, what that helps cats do is see better in low
light conditions. And so light comes into the eye, it reflects
off of that lens, and then it goes back out the eye, and
really helps cats be able to see in those low light times like
dusk and dawn and at night.
Jack: Hi, my name is Jack, and I'm 10 years old, and I'm living
in Wellington, New Zealand, and my question is, do cats have
their own language and can talk to each other? Thank you. I love
your show. Goodbye.
Jane: Are cats able to talk to each other? And how do they do
that?
Unknown: Yes, absolutely. And so it's really interesting, because
I would say cats communicate in three main ways. Vocally, right?
So there's many different sounds that cats make. They roar, they
purr, they hiss, they growl, they you know, snort, they huff.
They do all these kinds of different sounds to communicate
with one another. They meow, right? They kind of communicate
that way, so very similar to what we may hear in some
aspects, maybe other than a roar, from our domestic cats,
right, from our cats that live in our house. But they also
communicate through body language. It's a very important
way to for animals to communicate, and people actually
communicate a lot through body language as well, whether or not
we realize it. And lastly, using scent. And so it's not unusual
for wild cat species to do various forms of marking. We
talked about scraping before, and how they'll use their hind
feet to kind of, you know, scrape the ground and leave
scent with those glands that are in those paws, and typically in
combination with urine or feces. Or they'll spray, particularly
large cats. They love to spray on items especially high up to
try and attract maybe females, or for females to kind of
communicate that they're ready to have kittens with the males
that are in the area, right? Or to also mark territory and say,
Hey, this is my home, and I don't want anybody else in it
type of deal. So they use, really, those three main forms
of communications, vocal, body language and using scent.
Ronan: Hi, my name is Ronan, and I'm six years old. I live in New
York City. Why do some cats roar and why do some purr?
Jane: Who can purr and who can roar?
Unknown: Great question. So the species that can roar are lions,
leopards, jaguars and tigers?
Jane: Can they all purr? Can all cats purr?
Unknown: So the cats that can roar can't purr, but the cats
that can't roar can purr.
Jasper: My name is Jasper. I'm I'm in second grade. I live from
Long Beach, Washington. I'm almost eight years old. And my
question is, what are some ways to get a cat to trust you?
Because there is this white cat that was at my neighbor's house
that I really wanted to trust me, but it's scared of me.
Jane: We would never recommend that you pressure an animal or
harass an animal. But what are some of the things that you can
do that won't make an animal scared? And Jasper's animal is
presumably a house cat, not a wild cat, but how can you
observe an animal and start to gain its trust?
Unknown: Yeah, so I think to make sure, again, we're talking
about really two different kinds of animals: domestic animals and
wild animals. And when it comes to wildlife and wild animals,
it's actually not a bad thing that they don't trust humans.
You know, unfortunately, humans can be a big source of mortality
for wildlife, and this can actually cause a lot of problems
for some species that encourage wildlife around human areas and
may end up resulting in both injury to the wild animal and to
people. And so it's actually a good thing if wildlife does not
trust us, and one of the ways that we can help animals remain
wary and wild animals remain weary is to always respect them.
Always give wildlife plenty of space. But we're talking about
our domestic cat friends. I actually just experienced this
myself a little over a year ago, where we had a younger kitten
and her mom running around our apartment complex, and I was
living in Pennsylvania, and one of the ways that you can get
domestic cats to trust you is you can feed them. Sometimes the
way to a kitty's heart is through their stomach, so you
can use things like treats or food to encourage them to hang
around the area that you want them to be in. But also
recognize that it's not unusual for cats that may not have had
too much exposure to people to be super weary of people as
well. And time is a really just big one. And so making sure that
you're always giving a positive experience for your domestic cat
friends, not wild cat friends around you, and they'll
eventually begin to trust you. And you know what? It worked for
me. We now own that little kitten that was running around,
and she is an absolute housepanther, but she loves to
be pet.
Jane: So Emily, we're here in the wilderness in Vermont, and
we've hiked up and hiked down and gotten to this boggy, marshy
area, and you've shown us the signs of potentially moose,
maybe bear. We've seen deer poop. One thing we have not seen
is any cat of any kind. Why did you bring us here when we
haven't even seen any cats?
Emily Carollo: Yeah, so most cat species are incredibly elusive.
They're really good at not being seen because they don't really
want to be seen. So here in Vermont, we have two native cat
species, one far more rare than the other, and actually found a
little bit further up in northern Vermont, which is the
Canadian lynx. And then we also have bobcats. But even though
bobcats are pretty common, they have healthy populations
throughout the Northeast, they're still really hard to
see. They're really good at avoiding people. So I wanted to
kind of bring us to this landscape because there are, you
know, native cats of Vermont that live in these woods that
you can occasionally find sign for when you're looking for it.
But also because there was a third native cat species that
lived here in the Northeast, and that is mountain lions. They're
also called pumas, catamounts, cougars, they go by many
different names because they're found, or historically were
found, throughout a vast area of North and South America, so
encountering many different people that called them by many
different names. And one of the projects that I'm working on is
looking at trying to see if wild mountain lions can come back to
the eastern United States. You know, large cats like mountain
lions fill very important niches. So right now, I'm
working on a project that's looking at the possibility of
this native cat that was once here to come back and either
through the form of natural recolonization, which we've
done, which means that cats come back on their own right, into
places that they formally existed on the landscape. And
we've done some research that, unfortunately, does not look
very promising for that. But there is also always the
possibility of humans doing something called a
reintroduction and bringing cats back, you know, through human
activity, right? And essentially, this is a very
interesting topic. But it's also not new to the northeast. You
know, believe it or not, there were a number of species
reintroduced to many northeastern states, including
fisher, including bald eagle, and some that had populations
reinforced because they were so low. Some of the common ones
that we see, white tailed deer, wild turkey, river otter,
beaver. I mean, all of these species that we see today pretty
frequently and may have very healthy populations throughout
many northeast states, were actually reintroduced or
reinforced, meaning we took animals from another part of the
range, typically out west or in Canada, and brought in extra
individuals to add to the population that was struggling
here in the Northeast. So it's really kind of cool to come to
an environment where we know mountain lions once walked, you
know, at some point, and we have an opportunity to maybe try and
fix some of the mistakes of the past that humans made, and be
really great to be able to say sorry and bring them back.
Jane: Wow, that would be really something if mountain lions were
reintroduced, brought back, to the northeastern United States.
There's no reintroduction plan in motion at the moment, and
lots of people would want to weigh in with very strong
feelings on both sides as that plan progresses. But it's pretty
cool to walk through the same woods that mountain lions once
called home, and imagine these large predators may be coming
back someday. Thanks to Emily Carollo of Panthera for sharing
her knowledge and answering all of your wild cat questions.
That's it for this episode. If you have a question about
anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do
on a smartphone using an app like voice memos, then email the
file to questions@butwhykids.org. But
Why is produced by, oh, wait! Remember at the beginning of the
episode when I told you to close your eyes and pretend you were
at the trailhead on a beautiful, snowy day in Vermont? I never
told you to open your eyes again! I'm sure none of you
peeked during this whole episode, so go ahead and open
your eyes now.
But Why is produced by Melody Bodette and me, Jane Lindholm,
at Vermont Public. Joey Palumbo is our video producer. If you
want more But Why, we produce a short video episode called a But
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