8 May 2026

Introducing: Chasing Cats

Like so many of us here, I am obsessed with wild cats. For the past fifteen years, wild cats have pretty much shaped my entire life and work as a conservation photographer and guide. From bobcats in California, to manul in Mongolia and black-footed cats in South Africa, I’ve been fortunate to spend these years telling stories about thirty of the forty species of felines.

That journey has now grown into a bigger project.

In partnership with Panthera, my partner Rachel and I, are launching Chasing Cats — an effort to create the first-ever comprehensive photo catalog of all wild cat species, while helping protect felines across their range. So many of these cats simply need more attention, and we want to keep telling their remarkable stories.

The project is not just about the cats themselves, but also about the search. Anyone in the mammalwatching community knows that the challenge, failures, persistence, and occasional moments of magic are often what make wildlife encounters so meaningful. Many wild cats exist almost like ghosts, surviving in remote or fragmented habitats while remaining largely unknown to the public.

Over the coming years, Rachel and I will travel across a wide range of ecosystems, documenting the remaining (now six!) species through long-form YouTube episodes, photography, conservation storytelling, and interviews with researchers working to protect them.

A huge inspiration for this project has been the mammalwatching community itself. I’ve learned an enormous amount from the trip reports and shared knowledge here over the years, and we hope this project can contribute something meaningful back to all of you as well.

We are currently producing episodes focused on species such as the jaguarundi, Chinese mountain cat, southern oncilla, and many others rarely featured in mainstream wildlife media.

If you’d like to follow along (and subscribing is hugely appreciated), you can do so on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CatExpeditionsTV

or on the website: https://www.chasingwildcats.com/photo-catalog/

And thank you to Jon Hall and this entire community for creating such an inspiring corner of the wildlife world, we feel honored to be a part of it.

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Sebastian Kennerknecht
My wife, Rachel, and I own and lead tours for Cat Expeditions and Whale Expeditions, bringing people eye-to-eye with wild cats and cetaceans. We care deeply about providing extraordinary experiences for our guests, prioritize small group tours for intimate interactions, insist on ethical photography and tourism, putting the welfare of the wildlife first. Conservation is the backbone of our beliefs and our business, and we give 10-20% of our tour costs to local conservation projects. We select tour locations in places that provide and support economic incentives for local communities to own and steward long-term conservation. When I am not leading tours, I work as a conservation photographer for NGOs, telling stories about wild cats and their threats.
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