On the Track of the Cat (Part 3)

Scavenging Dinner from a Leopard

by Richard Conniff

(Continued from part 2)

One day, we caught a female leopard, which hissed and lunged at us in her cage. With his bow, Txoma shot an arrow tipped with a syringeful of sedative into her flanks. When the leopard went down, Stander pulled her from the cage, wrapped his arms around her chest and lifted her off the ground. The leopard raised her head and looked around with dull, puzzled eyes. Her tongue lolled out endlessly, curled round and licked her nose. She stayed in this state of twilight waking while Stander weighed her and took blood and hair samples. Then he peeled back her lips to measure her canines with a caliper. (The uppers were both about 27 millimeters long, which translates, in U.S. standard measurement, to really big.) "Is she waking up?" someone asked. "Yeah," Stander replied. He put a radio collar on her and carried her back to the cage to recover overnight.
    The trackers had already identified 13 different leopards along this unpromising 12-mile stretch of road, and it reminded Stander of the estimate by scientists at the World Conservation Union (formerly called the International Union for Conservation of Nature) that perhaps 300,000 leopards survive in sub-Saharan Africa. (In the Middle East, Russia and much of Asia, on the other hand, leopards are doing poorly; India, with an estimated 7,000 leopards, is their biggest stronghold outside Africa.) The population naturally varies with habitat. In the rain forest, a male leopard might get by in a home range of only about 50 square miles; in the Kalahari Desert, he might need around 1,300. Either way, the average person could practically step on a leopard and never know it.
    "On 1,200 occasions," said Stander, "we've walked right up to a leopard. We knew it was there because of the radio collar. And in those 1,200 times, we actually saw leopards only twice. They just move off. We hear the signals all around us." One time, Stander was flying low, radio-tracking from an ultralight. "I saw the leopard directly below me under a bush, and I told the trackers where it was. Six trackers walking straight toward the leopard. I was getting scared because they were so close. These guys were about 50 feet away. This was flat country, no rocks, just scrubby vegetation. And the leopard just slinked down on its belly, it just snaked around them, and it was on their trail. They never saw it."
    Leopards generally run away from humans. Tkui and Txoma counted on it so completely, they said one day as we sat around a campfire, that they sometimes followed fresh tracks to steal a leopard's kill. The desert was harsh, and hunting was always uncertain. So it wasn't, as the archaeologist had suggested, just early hominids who scavenged for a living at the leopard's expense. "If we can see the possibility of food, we follow," said Tkui, who was busy frying bread cakes in oil.
    Leopards are, after all, better hunters. For instance, the steenbok, a small, generally solitary antelope, is extraordinarily vigilant against predators. A gifted San hunter can approach undetected, "if everything is perfect," no closer than about 60 feet, said Stander. A leopard, on the other hand, can often get as close as 3 feet. It doesn't need to get that close, since it can pounce 20 feet in the air, "but the moment you pounce, the animal hears you and it's off. So the closer you can get the better." Once it kills an animal, the leopard will typically stash it up a tree and return three or four nights in a row to feed. It will often wait out the day nearby. So the idea of walking up and stealing the kill in broad daylight sounded risky. But the leopard, said Txoma, "always just runs."
    Or almost always.

(to be continued tomorrow)

NOTE: The population estimates mentioned in the article are outdated, and probably unrealistic, according to Philipp Henschel of Panthera, the wild cats conservation nonprofit. A 2023 paper in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation estimated the total world population at just 250,000 leopards, but allowed that the true number might be much different. A more precise way to get at what’s happening to leopard populations is to look at their habitat, says Sarah Durant, a cat researcher with the Zoological Society of London. (Sarah also once introduced me to the cheetahs she studied in the Serengeti, for a National Geographic feature I was writing. It was fabulous, and I am forever grateful.) She and Henschel were co-authors on a 2016 study finding that leopards now occupy just 25–37% of their historic range, with some subspecies facing even deeper cuts in their habitat. Leopards are remarkably elusive, especially for census takers. They are somehow capable of living among us unseen, even in the most densely populated cities. Much better, though, to put the people in cities, and the leopards in their original habitat.