This is a calendar from the Alianza Gato Andino. This is a crucially important organisation concerned with the conservation of the Andean Mountain Cat. I really like this calendar because the pictures show us very clearly the habitat and landscape of the majestic but barren area where this little cat lives.
This is an embedded version. The best way to see the individual pictures which are larger than the width of the page is to center them using the bar at the base and then scroll down and use the left hand margin thumbnails to select.
This link takes you to a wider version. The language is Spanish I believe. Next year there will be an English version but maybe we should stick to Spanish.
I’d love to visit this place. So wide open and free of people…. LOL. My spirit soars when I see the space and the raw feeling of nature. Great pictures. I hope you enjoy them.
The photograph for January (Enero) is stunning. It is hard to tell it is a small cat. If you look at it just right it could be a big as a cougar!
I agree with Marc in how remarkable these small wildcats are. Another favorite of mine is the sand cat. I might have never known about them if not for PoC.
Yes, you can’t tell the size in that picture but they are like small to medium domestic cats in size. Almost tame as well.
Me too I learned about many more wildcats from POC. The one thing that really breaks my heart is to think about the more curious and very wild little cats actually coming up to humans for a sniff and the humans taking advantage of their total naiveté by killing them so easily. This thought looping in my head is truly one of the most nightmarical ones. It makes my stomach turn and it makes me enormously sad to think about these little animals having rocks thrown at them for being their wild and curious selves. The old adage that curiosity kills the cat is most tragic in such instances.
It shows up the cruel, superstitious and ignorant side the dreaded human. Sorry if that sounds harsh on the human but I think it is a fair comment. There are very few of these cats left in the wild (some say 2,000) and yet local people were still killing them. Work has taken place to educated the local people to try and change their culture.
https://pictures-of-cats.org/Andean-Mountain-Cat-Facts-For-Kids.html
It is very beautiful and so is the cat. I especially like the smaller wildcats. I find them to be very beautiful and perfect somehow – moreso even than the big ones. They are also much lesser known. I have heard the Andes are extremely beautiful and rugged and untouched. The calendar has some photos of some amazing looking areas of landscape. I’d love to see them in real life. I’ve not been along the western side of south America but have always wanted to see it one day.
It is the space and it seems to be a bit the world that is less marked and altered by people than other areas. I think you could get in touch with something – spirit, universe, life, cosmos – if you stood amongst those mountains and plains. And the Andean cat has little or no fear of the human which shows how natural the place is except for the fact that superstitious local humans likes to kill the cat for some sort of spiritual rite. Humans can never get it right when it comes to nature.
Actually it seems like that until humans live in cities – completely devoid of nature – they do not learn the value of nature. Thats why most consevationists and people who care are from the city and the humans who destroy are country people. As a human it means one simple thing: we are incapable of appreciating and therefore respecting what we have until we don’t have it. Simple as that.
Well said Marc. We have a long history of destroying a species completely and then spending the next 100 years figuring out how to bring it back from extinction 😉 Completely mad. We look at cloning and DNA samples from fossils and that sort of stuff. It would have been far simpler to behave with a little more common sense and respect for nature in the first place.
The rarer a species becomes the more likely we are to want to kill it and possess it or bits of it. There is something inherently defective in the human psyche that irritates me.