Caracal: A Jumper Extraordinaire With Satellite Dish Ears

The caracal is a small, solitary, wildcat with reddish-tan fur, a white chin and underbelly and giant, black tufted ears. In fact, their name comes from the Turkish language: "karrah-kulak," meaning "black ears."

The caracal is sometimes referred to as a "desert lynx" or "Persian lynx." This is understandable, because these two exotic cats share distinctive ear tufts, although technically the name "lynx" refers to a different genus. Caracals' coats are a uniform tawny brown, whereas the lynx species are usually spotted.

Although the caracal's closest relatives are the serval and golden cat, they like different habitats than either of these felids.

Caracals can be found in grasslands, woodlands and scrubland, steppes and desert throughout Africa, the Middle East, India and Central Asia. Existing somewhere in the middle of the food chain, they do well in arid landscapes but require a bit of cover to escape predators like lions and hyenas.

Caracals can go long periods without water and eat whatever they can get their paws on: birds, monkeys, rodents, goats, you name it. When you're an opportunistic hunter, wild prey could be anywhere, so it helps to be fast, a great jumper and able to climb after something that skitters up a tree.

These cats are solitary animals, and being mostly nocturnal (hunting at night), they aren't easy to observe.

The fastest and largest of the African small wildcats, caracals are high jump champions, snagging birds out of the air with their sharp claws.

"Caracals are notorious for being able to jump almost 3 meters (10 feet) into the air from a crouch position to catch their prey," says Tertius Kohn, a professor in the Department of Medical Bioscience at the University of the Western Cape, in an email. "For an animal that is the size of a beagle dog, that's not too bad."

Caracals are light and stout, with large quadriceps and calf muscles. Kohn has studied the muscle fiber of both caracals and lions, in comparison to that of humans.

"What makes them so powerful is that one of their muscle fibres can produce three times more power than that of a human equivalent fibre — the caracal shares this feature with lions," says Kohn. "Where a human muscle is primarily composed of slow twitch fibres, containing lots of mitochondria to provide endurance, the caracal has stacks of fast twitch fibres, but lacks mitochondria. Thus, it is a sprinter, and not an endurance animal."

According to Kohn, having these fast twitch muscles explains why cats have to stalk their prey and pounce quickly. Otherwise an antelope, whose muscles also contain fast twitch fibres but who have much more endurance in their muscles, would be able to outrun the predator.

Because caracals often find themselves in wide-open spaces, if they can hear their prey, they can probably locate it with precision. Luckily, a caracal's ears are not only fabulous-looking, they're also unbelievably sensitive.

Watching a caracal's ears at work, you notice they're always moving, like satellite dishes in a spy movie. A caracal ear contains three muscle groups — 20 muscles in all — to control each ear independently of the other.

Although the tufted tips of the ears are useful in camouflaging the cat in long grass and are thought to be used by caracals for communicating with each other, they're also thought to direct sound into their ears.

Hundreds of years ago, caracals were domesticated in India and Persia, where they were used for wild game and bird hunting, as well as contests.

Owners of these exotic (and small) wild cats would compete by loosing the caracals on flocks of confined pigeons, seeing how many they could knock out of the air with a single massive jump. (Caracals pull this trick in the wild, too, and they can get as many as a dozen birds in a single jump!)

In many parts of their native range — mainly central and southern Africa — caracals have been so widespread and their numbers so plentiful that they've been considered a pest species, due to their taste for livestock.

The caracal is not legally protected in most of its range and is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. These days, caracals in central and southern Africa remain unprotected with relatively high numbers, probably due to the extirpation of black-backed jackals, which prey upon them.

Caracals are extremely adaptable and recolonize areas from which they've been removed relatively quickly and easily. They can tolerate the presence of people with relative ease, so long as the people don't mind losing a few chickens and goats.

Still, there are areas where the caracal is not nearly as numerous as it once was. In North Africa it is nearly extinct, and in Jordan and Pakistan it is considered an endangered species.

While it is legal in some states to keep a caracal as a pet, it is generally not allowed, as they are a far cry from domestic cats. And it's best to remember that a caracal, like any big cat, is a wild animal and domestication is not optimal for the cat and not generally advised.

A caracal can eat up to 2 to 3 pounds (0.9 to 1.3 kilograms) of fresh meat per day and can be quite destructive to household furnishings.