It’s the smallest cat in South-east Asia, and one of the smallest in the world, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the flat-headed cat can be elusive, though in reality this has more to do with the environment it prefers.
Named for its curiously flattened skull, this is a wild cat of wetlands and swamp forests with a global population, according to the wildlife conservation experts at the IUCN, of just 2,500 adult individuals.
But thanks to a camera-trapping project in the very southern tip of Thailand, scientists from Panthera, the global conservation group, have discovered a population in Princess Sirindhorn Sanctuary – the first observations of the species there in 30 years.
Thirteen detections were made in 2024 and 16 last year, and these included one female with her cub.
“At this stage, we cannot estimate the population size because the methods used so far do not allow for individual identification or abundance estimation,” says Rattapan Pattanarangsan, Panthera's conservation program manager for Thailand.
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There are two problems with gathering more information about how flat-headed cats are faring in the sanctuary – the first is the nature of the swamp forest terrain, with its complex mosaic habitat of open water and patches of land where rangers can move only 1-2km a day.
The second is the nature of the beasts themselves. “Individual flat-headed cats cannot be identified by coat patterns, which prevents us from using photographic capture-recapture methods,” Rattapan adds.
The flat-headed cat is a little studied feline weighing, on average, just 1.5kg, which is less than half your standard house cat in the UK.
One thing that excites the Panthera team in Thailand is that this newly-discovered population appears to be more concentrated than other ones in Malaysia and Indonesia.
“The higher concentration makes this site more suitable for intensive research,” says Rattapan, “and this area therefore offers strong potential for future ecological and behavioural studies.”
In the Prionailurus genus and therefore closely related to fishing cats and leopard cats, flat-headed cats are believed to subsist mainly on fish, though there has been no systematic study of their diet. They appear to be largely solitary, like most other small cats, with females rearing cubs with no male involvement.
They have a very restricted distribution and are only found on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, as well as the Malaysian peninsula (which includes the very southern point of Thailand).
Top image: Flat-headed cat. Panthera
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