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Distribution: Africa, Asia, north to Russia and Turkey Size: Up to 90kg Interesting facts:
Sightings: Night time in the district of Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve. Armed with spotlights and a bat detector, my group had decided to add night drives to our official itinerary. Our local guide was game for the attempt, although such excursions are not common in India and we would not be permitted inside the park itself after dark. But tigers do not respect boundaries. Daylight attempts to find the great cat had proven fruitless; it was 1998 and Ranthambhore was still recovering from a dreadful poaching episode. We all hoped that the night time would grant us a glimpse of one of the survivors. The skies were clear and surprisingly starry; the faint strands of traditional-sounding singing were audible from the village far away. Ranthambhore's periphery is a strange mix of the wild and the modern, with abandoned cement works vying for space with goatherds and camel-pulled carts loaded heavily with hay and wandering livestock. There is dust, and heat, and morning cold, and a stark desert-ness to the land that is more reminiscent of northern Kenya than the big tiger reserves further south. India's population is far greater than the whole of Africa, however, and the country is crowded, colourful and busy outside of the surviving wild fragments. But now, long after dusk, there was just silence, except for that distant singing. The road was arrow-straight and seemed dull grey in the headlights' beam. As I gazed down it, I gradually became aware that there was a group of large cats padding across not fifty yards ahead. Lions...? But there are no lions in Rajasthan. The cats revealed themselves to be leopards! The cat that walks alone was here in a pride of four. Never in Ranthambhore's history had anyone encountered such a thing. It was generally assumed that this was a female with three fully grown cubs; if so, then she certainly did very well in her niche on the edge of tiger country. Yet leopards are always full of surprises. I will never forget randomly shining a dying torch at a bush from a safari vehicle in Kenya and seeing two unspeakably brilliant eyes shine back from close range, or the leopard who didn't even look at us as he went on a prowl across the Serengeti, or the big male in Kanha who we tracked for miles down a dirt track before rounding a corner and glimpsing his magnificent shape up ahead. The realities of living alongside lions and tigers and wolves have fine-tuned the leopard's almost phantom-like qualities of melting away into its environment, and to human eyes have given it a very particular mystique. Things to Look For: The classic view of a wild leopard is of the felid dozing in a tree, often with a kill cached in the branches nearby, but even when you know that a tree holds a leopard, the cat can still be amazingly hard to spot. In the forests of India, their presence, like that of the tiger, can be given away by the alarm calls of deer and langurs. Many African national parks with leopards are also home to the cheetah. The leopard can be distinguished from its fleet-footed cousin by its rosette pattern of spots, much stockier build, lack of bands on its tail and no "tear drop" facial markings. It is often, though not always, found in rockier and more wooded terrain than the cheetah. Leopards overlap the range of the unrelated snow leopard and clouded leopard in parts of Asia, but neither of these highly elusive cats is likely to pose a serious identification question. Black-phase leopards are mainly found in south-eastern Asia, with a few recorded from East Africa. To date I've found this species in:
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Order: Carnivora, Family: Felidae