A wild cat with tall, tufted ears that also lives in grasslands and wetlands.
Its coat is sandy, reddish, or gray and usually has little visible patterning. It has a long face and tall ears tipped with small black tufts.
In Cambodia’s Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary, researchers combined camera records from 2009–2019 with DNA-identified scat to study jungle cats. Murid rodents made up 56% of prey biomass, followed by squirrels (15%), hares (12%), birds (8%) and reptiles (8%).
A habitat model placed jungle cats in dry deciduous forest at fewer sites than leopard cats. Both species were mainly nocturnal, but leopard cats ate a narrower diet dominated by murid rodents (73%). Jungle-cat records came from a forest where dry-season fires and declines in small vertebrates were reported.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
The authors say long-term conservation of jungle cats in Southeast Asia requires protecting large tracts of dry deciduous forest and strengthening law enforcement there.