Camera traps set in Ranikhet Reserve Forest to study yellow-throated martens yielded an unexpected daylight image of a leopard cat near Chaubatia Garden.
Typically nocturnal and elusive, the cat’s 11 am appearance highlights how edge habitats between forest and farmland support adaptable predators and shows how camera traps reveal hidden biodiversity beyond the primary study species.
We set up camera traps in the Ranikhet Reserve Forest in October 2025, hoping they would tell the story about the yellow-throated marten - a bold, brightly coloured member of the weasel family that moves through the mid-elevation Himalayan forests with a confidence few other small carnivores can match. The marten was the reason for the project. Everything else past the lens was a bonus.
One such bonus arrived from a station near Chaubatia Garden (2100m), set up close to an abandoned room at the forest edge, right where the forest begins and agricultural land ends. When I pulled the memory card and started scrolling through the pictures, I stopped on one timestamp 11 am (21/12/2025), a broad day light capture of a leopard cat, walking through the frame, unhurried.
Leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis) are not built for public appearances. They are largely nocturnal and crepuscular, moving under cover of dusk and dawn, and even where they are common, they are rarely seen. But a camera trap capture confirms their presence in such forests. A clear, daylight record, at an hour when most of the forest’s cats are meant to be asleep, felt like an anomaly worth paying attention to.
It’s a small reminder of how much camera traps can teach us beyond the target species. Chaubatia Garden is the type of location that typifies the interaction between forest and cultivated land, the kind of edge habitat that leopard cats are known to use freely. They are adaptable animals, found in dense forest, scrubby foothills, and the margins of villages and farmland, as long as there’s enough cover and enough prey. A midday movement along that edge may simply mean the forest was quiet enough, or the cover thick enough, for it to feel safe moving there.
The leopard cat is the size of large domestic cats, weighing around 4 kilograms. It bears a patterned coat with dark rosettes and spots, two dark stripes running from the eyes toward the ears, and a tail that is often ringed near the tip. It can easily be mistaken for a much bigger cat at a quick glance, which is likely how it earned its common name, though it shares no close kinship with the common leopard (Panthera pardus).
It is one of the most widely distributed wild cats in Asia, found from the foothills of Pakistan and Afghanistan across the Himalayan belt into Southeast Asia, China, and the Russian Far East. In the Himalayas, it has been recorded at elevations reaching well over 4,000 metres. Its diet leans heavily on rodents, along with birds, reptiles, and insects. However, when the opportunity arises, it is a useful ally for farmers, dealing with crop pests near forest edges like the one at Chaubatia.
Globally, the species is listed as Least Concern by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, largely because of how widely and successfully it has adapted across landscapes, including disturbed and human-modified ones. In India, however, it receives strict legal protection under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and conservationists increasingly caution that a reassuring global status can mask real, local pressures like habitat loss, and hunting.
The leopard cat wasn’t the record we set out to capture. But that’s the reason why camera trapping is such a valuable method, as every station is a passive witness. A study built around one species ends up assembling incidental evidence for many others: one that uses the forest edge; one that moves by day versus night; one that shares space with the animal you’re actually trying to understand.
For a landscape like Ranikhet, where systematic, long-term data on small carnivores is thin, even a single well-timestamped image adds something real to the record of a confirmed presence. Small cats rarely get the research attention that tigers and leopards do, simply because they’re harder to see and less charismatic to fund. Records like this one are how that gap slowly gets filled in.
This camera-trapping study is being carried out with the permission from the Uttarakhand Forest Department. We are grateful to the Ranger, Superintendent and the forest guards for their continued support and cooperation with the fieldwork, without which this study would not have been possible.
Umrah Viquar is a PhD Scholar at the Department of Wildlife Sciences, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. Orus Ilyas, is Professor at the Department of Wildlife Sciences, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth