The Sunda leopard cat is a small wild cat of Southeast Asian islands. Its orange-yellow coat has dark spots, and it hunts mainly small mammals on the ground at night.
Its orange-yellow coat has small to medium dark spots. The underside is whitish with scattered dark blotches.
The Sunda leopard cat is a small wild cat found on Borneo, Sumatra and other islands. It hunts at night and may rest by day in dense vegetation covering the ground.
Published in 2021, a study followed 11 radio-collared cats in an oil palm estate in Central Kalimantan, Borneo, between July 2014 and March 2018. Researchers checked their locations by day as well as at night. Daytime shelters lay in rows of cut palm fronds overgrown with ferns and other vegetation.
Some cats remained resting even as workers gathered fruit nearby and stacked fresh fronds above them. Females with two to four kittens were observed in this vegetation on several occasions. The researchers considered these overgrown frond rows useful shelters for both daytime resting and young cats. In this estate, material left from plantation work helped create places for a wild cat’s daily life.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
A 2019 experiment in Riau, Sumatra, showed that understory management affected use of plantation plots by these cats. Comparing 2013 with post-treatment observations in 2015–2016, detections remained stable in plots retaining understory without herbicide, but declined under normal management and complete understory removal. The authors recommended reducing understory spraying and management where practicable.