I got back from my annual leave yesterday, and wow oh wow, what a surprise when I got to the office! Uyai and Mike had found a leopard and uploaded about half a dozen stunning shots of it on my blog system. What a sighting! Well done! Mike, Uyai and the guests spent an entire hour observing this leopard who was very relaxed. Leopard sightings are of course fairly rare, in general, but we are starting to see them more and more regularly. One reason is that the number of leopards is clearly on the rise (which is great news!), and also because of the regular game drives (it is on busy days 4 game drivers now), they are starting to lose their inherent fear of anything large moving around them close by.
We often hear that misconception that animals associate game drivers with human activity. They don’t. A leopard will see a game driver as an odd thing on 4 wheels that moves around. Over time the leopard will realise that it is a “thing” that is not presenting danger. If there is a relaxed female leopard, then she will pass on that knowledge and behavior to her litter, and they will turn out very relaxed around game drivers too. But: if a guest does as much as standing up or opening a door and stepping out of the vehicle (which is why we strictly prohibit such behavior), then they will spot the human shape and in almost all cases run away.
Anyway, I am going off on a tangent, let’s go back to this leopard sighting! See the photos below. What a beauty. Many thanks to Uyai for taking the photos and sending them to me. I wish I had been there to see this leopard for myself. So here some interesting facts about leopards:
– it is one of the “Big 5”
– historically, it could be found all the way from Western Africa to as far as Eastern China. It is also not uncommon in the Middle East, but in some countries such as Tunesia, Kuwait, Singapore, Libya and a few others it has sadly disappeared. This is primarily due to habitat loss and hunting.
– the leopard is not threatened (yet!), due to its versatile hunting skills, speed and climbing skills. But still, any reserve with leopards is a big welcome in the conservation of these beautiful cats.
– they even existed for a long time in some European countries around the Mediterranean basin, but they are extinct there now.
– there are about a dozen sub-species of the leopard!
