The Ringtail's No Cat

RINGTAILS: NATURE'S TIRELESS ACROBATS FOCUS ON NATURE

Text by Tom Dollar Photographs by Marty Cordano (ABOVE AND OPPOSITE PAGE) Fast, agile, and a superb climber, the ringtail, or North American cacomistle, is related to the raccoon, but has no identifying mask. Not often seen because they're nocturnally active, ringtails are usually found in pairs.

Ringtail, not ringtail cat. The cat moniker comes from the ringtail's popularity among prospectors. Miners fed them, encouraging ringtails to hang around mine shafts and cabins where at night they pounced on invading spiders, scorpions, rats, and mice thus "miner's cat."

Adding to its identity problems, the ringtail's Latin name, Bassariscus astutus, means "cunning little fox," but it's no canid either, belonging instead to the Procyonidae, the family of raccoons and coatimundis. In Mexico the ringtail may be called sal coyote, "graceful coyote," or mico de noche, "night monkey." Other English common names include "coon cat" and "cat squirrel." By any name, a ringtail is a two-pound bundle of energy, 24 to 32 inches long (half of which is tail) with a slender foxy face, catlike body, and bushy, banded tail, the bands becoming wider toward the tip.

Ringtails prefer meat, but also eat fruits, berries, and nuts. Spiders, crickets, grasshoppers, mice, lizards, and snakes are dietary staples. But these clever, opportunistic predators eat almost anything they can kill. In 1989 a ringtail plundered the nest of one of the first breeding pairs of thick-billed parrots reintroduced to the wild in Arizona, killing the male parrot and hatchlings. But ringtails are food, too. Great horned owls, coyotes, and bobcats are their chief predators. Even raccoons have been known to kill and eat them.

What ringtails are able to do on a sheer rock face is enough to make a human rock-climber weep with envy. They know all the tricks, and then some. Watching them, I can't help but speculate that early Pueblo Indian rock-climbers mastered their techniques by imitating ringtails.

Of course ringtails have unique anatomical advantages over human climbers. Partially retractable claws and soft footpads provide them with outstanding purchase on the slickest of surfaces, and their unusually bushy tails function like balance poles. What is most extraordinary is that ringtails can rotate their hind feet a full 180 degrees, enabling them to descend headfirst with the same speed and agility as when climbing.

With these physical attributes, such climbing techniques as chimney stemming inching up a rock chimney, forefeet on one side, hindfeet on the other come naturally to ringtails. Ditto for the power leap, a maneuver requiring lunging across a cliff wall from one flimsy toehold to another.

But the ringtail has one special trick of locomotion that leaves onlookers bug-eyed. As every climber knows, when a rock chimney becomes too wide for stem-ming, you're stuck unless you can find another route up. For the ringtail, no problem. It simply springs forward, ming, you're stuck unless you can find another route up. For the ringtail, no problem. It simply springs forward, ricocheting from wall to wall all the way to the top.

A researcher friend once kept a family of ringtails indoors for many months. Tirelessly, he says, they bounced off the walls and ceiling. He could never figure out how they did it.

Although the ringtail ranges throughout Arizona from the lowest elevations up to about 6,500 feet, including the urban areas of Phoenix and Tucson, many people have never seen one, so thoroughly nocturnal are its habits. I'm lucky. Friends of mine living in Bisbee's Mule Mountains have a large picture window overlooking a ledge atop a 20-foot cliff.

My friends own no television. Nightly they are entertained by a troop of ringtails that clambers over the cliff ledge to seek tidbits of food cached in rocky nooks and crannies. One night recently we watched for hours as ringtails frisked and tumbled on the rocks.

It was like seeing the most astounding acrobatic performance you've ever witnessed on the world's biggest TV screen.