Animal · South Africa, Namibia, Botswana
Caracal
Caracal caracal — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The caracal is a slender wild cat with long black tufts on its ears that hunts in the dry savannas and rocky hills of Africa and western Asia. It is famous for leaping high into the air to catch birds in mid-flight.
Picture credit: Leo za1 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Naturedata (CC0) · Dirk Froebel (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the caracal live?
Home: Dry savannas, scrubland and rocky hills of Africa and Asia.
In the wild it lives in these countries: South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Iran.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 65-90 cm long, plus a 30 cm tail; 45 cm at the shoulder. It weighs about 12 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A caracal is about the size of a medium dog, with a short reddish coat and hind legs that are longer than the front ones, which is where its spring comes from. When a flock of birds takes off, the cat pushes off and can reach more than three metres into the air, batting a bird down with a front paw. The black tufts on its ear tips are up to four and a half centimetres long, and caracals twitch them at each other when they meet, rather like a signal flag. They hunt alone and mostly at night, taking hares, rodents, small antelopes and birds. Caracals live across much of Africa and from Turkey to India, but they are shy and hard to spot, even where they are common.
Find it on the globe
Caracal is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How high can a caracal jump?
A caracal can leap more than three metres straight up from standing. It uses the jump to knock birds out of the air with its front paws, and a skilled cat sometimes brings down two at once.
What are the black tufts on a caracal's ears for?
They are long hairs growing from the ear tips, up to about four and a half centimetres. Caracals twitch them when they meet another caracal, so researchers think the tufts work as a kind of signal.
Is a caracal dangerous to people?
Caracals are shy and keep well away from people, and attacks on humans are not known. Farmers sometimes dislike them because a caracal may take a lamb, but the cat itself is no danger to us.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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