The August rains are autumn rains for me. The midday sun may boil the air a bit, but once a torrent falls from the sky, air is astringent and cool and gives me just a little taste of the coming short days of October, when the sun will cast at the steepest angles through the crimson leaves on the trees.
Though the land is still in verdant summer, I feel this coming coolness and revel in it a bit. Just a few days ago, I was standing out in a bit of post-downpour reveling when I spied a black cat moving softly along the far end of the lawn.
Before we moved here, the cats lived in a paradise, feeding and fighting as ferals do, and having their kittens on the old outbuildings that abut this property. The constant wanderings of dogs in and out of the house have put an bit of a damper on the cats constantly wandering here.
But every once in a while, I see one moving along the edge of the property, perhaps searching old haunts and checking to see if a giant coyote with a black muzzle still lived at this address.
On this day, though, the rain fell good and hard, and then the stooping August sun peared out to cast a yellow glow upon the land. And the sun rays cast upon the cat’s black coat, and its nearly pantherine form seemed to glow ethereally.
The cat glanced back at me, and I recognized its slender head and gracile form as belonging to a queen and not a tom. Perhaps, it was the same queen I’d seen nearly month ago, moseying through the summer grass with four kittens in tow. Two black ones like their mother and two wildcat tabby ones cavorted all around their mother, who moved with the solemn determination of something wild and untouchable.
Their lives, like all things trying to be wild, are fleeting and harsh Hazards abound. Just few days later, I saw the flattened form of a black kitten on the highway just down from the house. I cannot know whether it was one of the four I’d seen cross the lawn, but I suspect that it was.
I am not a cat person. You will never confuse me with one, but I cannot help marvel at what they are. Many species of small wild cat exist in the world, but only a single form of wildcat managed set up shop in agrarian society.
This wildcat, now known by the name Felis lybica, found that staking out granaries and wheatfields for mice and hamsters was a pretty good way to survive. The grain ensured hordes of rodents for the stalking, and man’s hatred for all things large and predatory kept away all the wildcat adversaries or at least kept them at bay.
And over time the cat came to be man’s little wheatfield leopard, stalking and killing and living and traveling over the whole world as the ultimate mesopredator.
This is the Tribe of Lybica, the clan of little predators that don’t cause us much concern, and whole lineages of cats have passed before them. The mighty Smilodon and the American lion have fallen from the land. and even the squalling cougar has passed on from its haunts, though a few claim to see them slipping about in the undergrowth.
The Tribe of Lybica lives at the edge of human civilization, but it also lives in a much vaunted status as a companion animal. The internet worships them in almost the same garish way as the Ancient Egyptians did. They filled their walls with many images of cats, while we fill our “walls” with memes of “kitters” and “cattos.”
The Anthropocene is the age where the little monsters thrive and the big ones live mostly in forgotten and inaccessible redoubts. You’ve never seen an Amur tiger stroll down an alley in Pittsburgh, but you’ve surely caught the glance of one of the local ferals flitting away behind a parked car.
So the black cats will thrive well in my neighborhood. The speeding car is their only main concern. They will stand starkly against the winter cold and driving rain, and we will consider them very little.
But they will thrive, and in the spring, the queens will have their kittens, and a whole new generation of the Lybica will inherit the grounds.
And this cycle will repeat long after I’ve moved on.
As much as I will rail that cats need to be kept indoors and kept neutered, they will thrive so long as human kind thrives.
And when our species goes the way of the dinosaur, their lineage will be spread across the globe. It might be cut down in size once the bigger predators return, or they could evolve into the new tigers and cougars that prowl the world post-humanity.
So the Tribe of Lybica’s fate is linked to ours, but perhaps not as much as we might assume.
Their connection to us will always be tenuous and fleeting but also linked and tied. A remarkable paradox, to be sure.
Does the lybica really make a good species in relation to the silvestris, or is this a case of more taxonomic subjectivity to consider the silvestris, the lybica (includes cafra and ornata), and the bieti separate species?
I think it does. If we’re considering Old World and North American red foxes to be distinct species because of wider genetic divergence than initially believed, then I think we have to divide up the wildcat too. They are still chemically interfertile, so much so that there are no genetically pure Scottish wildcats anymore.
“The African wildcat appears to have diverged from the other species about 131,000 years ago.”
Quote from Wikipedia’s African Wildcat
page.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141007144510.htm
“In contrast, this new research shows that the red foxes of North America and Eurasia have been almost entirely reproductively isolated from one another for roughly 400,000 years.”
Quote fromScienceDaily.
Differences
1) The lybica wildcat isn’t/wasn’t reproductively isolated from the silvestris one like the vulpes red fox is/was from the fulvus one. Also, the lybica’s indigenous range included Turkey and southeastern Europe at one time, which are also part of the silvestris’s indigenous range.
2) The lybica wildcat diverged from the silvestris one 131,000 years ago. The fulvus red fox diverged from the vulpes one 400,000 years ago.
131,000 is more than twice the divergence time between coyotes and gray wolves, and there is some reproductive isolation between silvestris and lybica now.
But don’t you tend to say that wolves and coyotes aren’t that good of a species?
One day we will realize that our entire concept of what a species is or isn’t is going to have to have an overhaul. Probably, as people moved across the globe with their cats, several small wildcats have contributed genetic material to that lovely animal we know as Felis lybica catus; maybe the ghosts of those long-ago furtive liaisons will eventually make themselves known in the molecular data; maybe (probably) most of them have been evolutionary dead ends.
I make a distinction between feral colonies, whether managed or not, and true outdoor working cats. Of course, those cats have no idea they are “working”, any more than a working dog suspects it isn’t “playing” with its handler when it is on duty. My small cadre of porch cats keep my yard free of vermin and venomous snakes. They are so accustomed to birds, because I keep so many bird feeders out (out of reach of the cats, of course) that while they will lie and watch them for hours, only very rarely do they ever actually catch a bird.
Meanwhile, I have learned so much from them over the years! Who would have though that cats will mob snakes – killing those that frighten them and actually seeming to “herd” larger snakes such as racers away from the yard? I watched five of my porch cats relay to drive a large black racer away, earlier this summer.
My outdoor cats are as well cared-for as my indoor cats, are all neutered and vaccinated, and generally live long lives. They patrol the cellar and outbuildings, and walk with the dogs and me, but they stay very close to home; they’ve become aware of a certain presence in the brush that inhibits their desire to go on walkabout. Coyotes be numerous here, though they stay away from the yard because Heidi and Black have made it clear that this place and these kitties are off-limits.