Beautiful, sleek and majestic, also incredibly fast with big teeth, a big predatory appetite elusive and wild.
Getting a good snap of a wild cat is no walk in the park.
Sebastian Kennerknecht takes award-winning photographs of wild cats in their natural habitat and has twenty different species on his camera roll.
African leopard, Gabon. Photo: Sebastian Kennerknecht
Kennerknecht also operates a tour company so people can see wild cats in their natural habitat, and learn about them.
He has just returned from Zambia, he told Lynn Freeman.
“Zambia was absolutely incredible. It was the change from the dry season to the wet season, which means instead of having those typical African browns that you normally associate with Africa, we switched to greens and the cats we found were in these lush green landscapes, which was just amazing.”
His love for cats started as a student in Santa Cruz.
A mountain lion, Chile. Photo: Sebastian Kennerknecht
“I was very fortunate to go to a college that was incorporated into nature rather than destroying it when it was built.
“So that meant that there was still a lot of wildlife, there still is to this day, a lot of wildlife in and around campus including predators like bobcats.
“When I first started going there, I just made I made it my mission. I don't know why but I just got absolutely obsessed about trying to find these bobcats which are just a little bit bigger than your house cat at home.”
He would rise early to try and capture them, he says.
“One day I got to find this mom and her almost fully-grown cub and that encounter changed the rest of my life because they were so calm with me being there, they would in fact fall asleep 10 to 15 feet away which is just incredible to have an animal be so trusting and seeing them hunt and just watching them behave naturally was a moment that has stuck with me to this day and it is the reason why I focus on wild cats today.”
Bobcat, California. Photo: Sebastian Kennerknecht
He sees his encounters as a “silent conversation,” he says.
“An animal, even though it's not talking to me, we talk to each other, they still talk to us non-verbally. The way for example, a dog, your domestic dog, shakes its tail when it's happy when a cat shakes its tail it's actually unhappy.
“And you know, those typical signs of cats putting down ears that means they're grumpy.”
There are 40 species of wild cat in the wild, he says, many of them very small.
They are also elusive, he says. The Borneo Bay Cat being a case in point.
"My client, which was a conservation organisation, said get a picture of a Borneo Bay Cat.
The black-footed cat is small and a formidable hunter. Photo: Sebastian Kennerknecht
“At that point in time, there was no high resolution of this cat in existence. And during the research I did, I saw that the biologists that were studying this cat, they use these trail cameras, cameras that they put into the forest, and they would get one photo of this cat every 4000 trap nights, which means one photo over 10 years.
“So, that was a fun challenge when they said okay, you have three weeks to get a photo of this cat for us.”
He got lucky on that occasion.
“We were able to get one single photograph of the Borneo Bay Cat and actually to this day, eight years later, it's still the only photo, the only high-resolution photo of this cat in the wild.”
Not so lucky, however, with the fishing cats of Sri Lanka.
“That was a little heartbreak actually. I've spent two months trying to photograph the fishing cat and all I have is the rear end of one.
“So, I'm definitely returning to Sri Lanka to try to get a better photograph of one in the future.”
The Malaysian clouded leopard. Photo: Sebastian Kennerknecht
