An elusive ring-tailed cat was spotted watching some friends play basketball in Texas.
The adorable raccoon-relative startled a group of friends enjoying a pickup game, KVUE reported.
"I was afraid of it," Jackie Zamora, said. "I just saw its tail, just wagging."
The animal was up in a tree, staring intently at the onlookers. Zamora had never seen an animal, or tail, quite like this one.
"A possum has a rat tail, so it wasn't that," Eric Garcia, Zamora's boyfriend said. "Raccoon, they're too fluffy. So I started thinking, 'What could it be; what could it be?' Then it came to my head, 'Has to be a monkey.'"
Garcia noticed something strange about the "monkey's" tail.
"The tail. That's what got me thinking, 'zebra tail, where'd that come from?'" he said.
Garcia called the San Antonio zoo to see if they were missing any lemurs, which usually have striped tails. The zoo had all of their lemurs accounted for, but they did have an idea of what the critter could be. Ring-tailed cats are often mistaken for the primates.
"They have very similar tails. Ring-tailed cats are actually not cats, they're related to raccoons. And they are much smaller and native to Texas. So that would be a much more likely suspect to what was spotted," zookeeper Lyssa MacMillan said.
Ring-tailed cats only come out at night, so it's rare to see one watching a daytime basketball game.
The ring-tailed cat sleep in dens during the day and come out at night to hunt. The carnivores eat a variety of prey, their diet consists mainly of " Birds, rodents, carrion, reptiles and amphibians, and insects such as grasshoppers and crickets " but they have been known to munch on some fruits and berries. Texas Parks and Wildlife wrote.
The ring-tail usually lives in rocky areas, but have been found in other habitats as well. They love to climb, and can even scale vertical walls.
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(Not the basketball-watching ring-tail)
