We received a sighting record from Jenna who had a wonderful encounter with a civet mum and two babies right at her own home at 6:30am in the morning! Here we share her photographs that captured the amazing interactions of this civet family.

Common palm civets spotted!

A watchful mum. The common palm civet is a solitary animal except when the mum has babies.

Look at how agile the civet mum was!

It seemed like civet mum wanted her babies to leave the window grilles.

The young ones had some difficulty climbing back onto the roof, so mum came to their rescue!

Jenna told us that after about 15 mins, they finally managed to climb up and onto the other roof. How glad we were to hear that mum saved the day!

Common palm civets are highly skilled climbers and they are often found in trees in the wild. The urban civets such as this family have adapted to living in urban spaces and have learnt to utilise structures such as drains, electric wires and roofs to travel to different places. They love to eat fruits such as mangoes and rambutans so they may drop by a home garden occasionally. Sometimes, a pregnant civet mum may also raise her little family in the roof spaces. They are active at night and are generally shy but sadly, not everyone is willing to share a home with these animals.

Their climbing abilities never fail to amaze us!

This civet family is lucky to have met Jenna, who accepted their presence readily. When asked if we could share her photos on this blog, she replied, “Please go ahead and use the photos as you wish. I am excited to be part of this as I love animals too.”

Our last wild urban native carnivore

This is heartening to hear and hopefully, more people will appreciate the existence of our native carnivore like Jenna does. What can be more exciting than to be able to enjoy wildlife in our own backyard!

Thank you Jenna for this lovely sighting and her friend, Pei Yan for encouraging her to do so.

Please share your sightings of the common palm civets with us at mammal@sivasothi.com.