I started telling you all about my kittens before June happened, so I'll tell you about all the others. Well, not all the the others.
We had four litters of Kittens and they all got named by themes from their mothers names.
Bearnie had her second litter. Last year, her kittens were Polar, Panda, Sunny, and Ursa. This year, they're famous movie bears, Paddington, Fozzie, Pooh, and Smokey. I'm probably not going to do posts about them, but maybe.
Cathy had her babies, who got named after wild Cats. Oncilla, Guina, Margay, Caracal, Colocolo, and BB (Borneo Bay Cat).
Wallaby had the last litter of the year and her babies are the Aussies, our little Echidna, Quokka, Emu, and Cassowary.
Please look forward to these 9-13 posts about my baby kittens. Since most of them have the same coat pattern, I apologize that my kitten pictures are just going to be adorable babies overall instead of the single specific kitten.
The first kitten I'm going to talk about is Colocolo, or the Pampas Cat.
These guys are from South America and pretty widespread. The pictures of them just look like extra-fluffy cats, which supports the suggestion that they eat anything meaty they come across.
This picture is taken from the Felidae Fund link below. As you can see, this is a very cute and fluffy kitten.
These guys are mainly nocturnal and terrestrial, so they hunt at night on the ground, but there are actual studies suggesting that they're 'cathemeral', which means around any time. That fits with the cats I've got around that love being noisy brats day and night. Interestingly, this isn't an attempted pun about cats being equally likely to be awake or asleep at any given time, but actually comes from Greek for 'through the day'.
From what I've seen, it seems like Colocolo is the scientific name for the species, and one of the names in use in some areas for a cat that they think is all one species, or possibly has been considered the same species but might be getting split into three, five, or seven different subspecies or entirely separate species. I'm not sure what the state of this debate is, I'm pretty sure half the sites I can check for these things don't know the state of the debate, and I'm just going to tell you that there is one, and it's up to you if you want to check this further.
The name Pampas Cat is from their habits of hanging around in the grass, since Pampas is a local word for grass. It's believed that Colocolo comes from the name of a warrior chief that lived in the area they're found, but I don't know a lot about that one.
Like a lot of things, these guys aren't studied a lot in the wild because, like a lot of cats, they know how to disappear into their habitat and avoid notice. Plus, there are a lot of things in South America that don't have nearly as much study on them as you'd think. There's a lot that scientists haven't investigated yet, the lazy brats.
In case you're wondering, these are on the list of creatures that might kill me but I would absolutely cuddle if I got the opportunity.
And now for my, admittedly more cuddly, versions, then I'll be back soon with information about the namesake of a sibling.
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