Caracal Coloring Pages
Caracals are medium-sized wild cats with long black tufts on their ears. Here you'll find cartoon caracal coloring pages for little ones and realistic ones for older kids, sitting and sleeping and pouncing and running.
Printable Caracal Coloring Pages
About Caracals
A caracal looks a bit like a house cat that's been stretched out and given a pair of very fancy ears. Its name comes from the Turkish word karakulak, which means "black ear," and once you've seen those long black tufts you'll understand why. Nobody knows for sure what the tufts are for. They might help a caracal hear better, or they might be a way to send messages to other caracals with a flick of the ears.
Caracals roam across Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and India. They like dry country best: savannahs, scrubby hills, semi-deserts and even mountains. The places you won't find them are thick forests and the middle of a true sand desert. Some live close to farms, where they sometimes get into trouble for helping themselves to the chickens. They hardly ever need a drink, because they get most of their water from the animals they eat.
And they can jump! A caracal can spring about three metres straight up and snatch a bird right out of the air. Long ago in India and Persia, people even trained caracals to hunt birds for them.
Coloring a Caracal
Think warm desert colors. A caracal's coat is sandy tan, with a richer gold or rusty brown along its back and the top of its head. Start light all over and build up the darker shades slowly, the way sunset creeps across a desert.
Leave the chin, throat, chest and belly white or pale cream, and add a little pale patch around each eye. Then grab your black for the backs of the ears and those famous tufts, plus a thin line that runs from each eye down toward the nose. Caracal eyes are usually amber or golden yellow.
Unlike leopards and cheetahs, grown-up caracals don't have big spots or stripes, so you can spend your time blending the fur instead. Pencil crayons are great for that. For the background, try pale dry grass in tans and soft greens, a few rocks and a big blue sky.
If you're coloring one of the cartoon caracals, there are no rules at all. A purple caracal with pink ear tufts sounds pretty great to me!