Zoology has a discipline: evolution; zoology is vertically integrated, concerned with biological organisation at the level of organisms in their environment, organs, tissues, cells and molecules. This blog meanders through the animal kingdom, from aardvarks and anoles, through mouse and man, to zorillas and zebras.
Last November, we had a great morning of wildlife on the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau north of Ruoergai in Sichuan. We arrived at the site (altitude 3,535 metres or 11, 300 feet) just before dawn. Almost immediately saw a Pallas’s Cat in the beam of the spotlight. However, it soon moved away. As light began to reveal the grassland we could see Plateau Pikas dashing in and out of their burrows. After short walk we looked over an area of marshland where there was a family of Black-necked Cranes (Grus nigricollis), the same species we had seen in Bhutan in 2016. The light was very poor but I managed to take a couple of still photographs at the extreme range of the zoom lens.
Black-necked Cranes
After walking back towards the car with pikas running and snowfinches flitting around us, two Pallas’s Cats were seen on a ridge. These cats are said to be solitary so we assumed that the two we saw together were a mother and her well-grown offspring. While some of the party tried to get nearer—and quickly becoming aware of the shortness of breath occasioned by rushing uphill at that altitude—but without frightening the cats, I set up a tripod and camera to take some video as one of the cats moved along the ridge line. Even with extra weighting gusts of wind moved the tripod slightly. These cats are only the size of a large domestic moggy and do not appear that big on the screen but you will be able to see their incredibly thick winter coat (which they shed in summer), the very flat face characteristic of the species and the low-set ears. Their slinky movement along the ground can only be described as like that of a miniature snow-leopard. So this video is like the dog that talked; remarkable for not that it talked well but that it talked at all.
Compared with other cats, the very short jaw has a set of premolar teeth missing. It is easy to see that these are ambush predators; nothing, not even their ears stand out from their outline. Pikas, their main prey on the plateau, must only be aware of them as they pounce. In Mongolia, their distribution is said to depend on adequate cover since the cats are preyed upon by wolves and foxes. Perhaps it is not surprising that the site we were visiting, which is well-known amongst the cognoscenti, has a couple of small quarries in which the cats can hide and in which one of ours was seen to disappear from view. They are animals of the steppes of Central Asia and have been recorded as high as 5,000 metres (these were at about 3,500 metres). Known as the Manul in Mongolia this cat was named Felis manul by Peter Paul Pallas (1741-1811) in 1776. Pallas was a Russian of German extraction employed by Catherine the Great as Professor of Natural History at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and to explore the geography and natural history of the outer regions of Russia. His expedition lasted from 1768 until 1774. Numerous mammals and birds are named after him. Another Russian explorer and naturalist, Nikolai Alekseevich Severtzov (1827–1885), moved Pallas’s Cat out of the genus Felis because it was so different from the rest of the species in that genus. He put it in a new genus Otocolobus, named from the Greek meaning ears cut short (i.e docked or maimed). For decades it was usually still referred to as Felis manul until 1907 when Pocock at the British museum upheld Severtzov’s classification. Molecular phylogenetic analysis indicates that it and an ancestor of the Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), which we also saw on this trip at a lower altitude, diverged about 5.19 million years ago. Pallas’s Cat is classified as Near Threatened by IUCN. It was hunted widely for its fur but the main threats are habitat loss, predation from the dogs used to guard herds against wolves (the Tibetan mastiffs used to guard the herds of domestic Yaks are huge) and the poisoning of their pika prey to improve the pasture for those Yaks. Fortunately, these cats had not seen the recent BBC series Big Cats in which footage, claimed to be the first, of Pallas’s Cats in the wild was shown. There they were said to be highly elusive but ours were anything but. More video from that morning on the Tibetan Plateau soon.
Below is a link to my video of an immature male Chinese Serow in the wild taken during out trip to Sichuan in November. China has a number of strange, to our eyes, ruminants, and the Serow is one of them. It is short, the back legs are longer than the front and this species has a mane. The older books often describe serows as ‘goat-antelopes’ but it is a term best avoided. They, along with the gorals (I also show a shot of the Chinese Goral), mountain goat and chamois, are included in one tribe of the subfamily Caprinae which includes all the sheep, goats and ibexes as well as the takins and musk-ox. The are all, of course, in that large family Bovidae. At present the individual we saw is considered a Chinese Serow. One species that occurred over much of Asia was split into four in the 1980s but there is still much debate on the taxonomy. So the Chinese Serow now goes under the name of that Père David (1826-1900), the famous French missionary and explorer, gave it in 1869: Capricornis milnedwardsii, for, I presume Henri (1800-1885), rather than his son, Alphonse (1835-1900), Milne-Edwards, the famous French zoologist with the very English name (his father was British). Chinese Serows inhabit steep mountain slopes where they eat leaves and shoots. They are nocturnal, solitary and shy, so they are rarely photographed in the wild.
We were surprised by the agility of the serows we saw. This one used its hooves and front legs to pull branches and leaves within reach of its mouth while it held the branches or saplings down with its own weight. We also saw one on the riverbank further downstream. Startled by traffic on the road it charged across the river and up the very steep opposite bank very quickly indeed. Those longer hind legs with powerful muscles soon had it away from the perceived danger. The size of its back legs reminded us of what we were told in Japan where another species of serow occurs in the mountains. Japanese girls of not so longer ago had to use the squat lavatories so loathed by western visitors to Asia and, it was said, developed leg muscle accordingly, rather than the slim legs they longed for. So ‘having legs like a serow’ is most definitely not a compliment in Japan. Later during the trip, at Tangjiahe, we found a dead immature serow by the side of the track. We were told it is not uncommon to find them dead and in the IUCN account of this species it is noted: In 1962, a die-off caused by an unknown epizootic was reported in the Tangjiahe area. There are reports of similar occurrences in Japan with parapoxvirus as the likely cause. In India, sarcoptic mange has been implicated in the die-off of Himalayan Serows. The Chinese Serow is classified as Near Threatened by IUCN. Another caprine we saw on the forested slopes was the Chinese Goral (Naemorhedus griseus). It is classified by IUCN as Vulnerable. The was taken using spotlights at night in the forests of Labahe, Sichuan Province.
