Leopard

The leopard is the big cat that refuses to disappear. It lives closer to more people, in more kinds of habitat, on a wider diet than any other large cat — and it does it almost entirely unseen, moving at night and vanishing into cover or up a tree by day.

Overview

Leopards range from the rainforests of the Congo to the deserts of the Kalahari, the foothills of the Himalayas, the snow forests of eastern Russia, and the edges of cities in India and South Africa. That flexibility is the leopard’s superpower: where lions and tigers need large wild prey and big protected space, a leopard can get by on rats, hares, monkeys, and the occasional stray dog in a patch of scrub near a town.

Physical characteristics

A leopard is built low, long, and immensely strong for its size, with a barrel chest, thick neck, and short powerful legs. The tawny coat is patterned with dark rosettes — broken rings that break up the animal’s outline in dappled shade. Leopards in dense forest tend to be darker and smaller; those in open, arid country are paler and larger. The melanistic (all-black) form, common in the humid forests of Southeast Asia, is the “black panther.”

Relative to its body, the leopard has perhaps the greatest strength-to-weight ratio of any cat: it can climb vertically while carrying prey heavier than itself.

Diet and hunting

The leopard’s recorded diet runs to nearly 100 species — dung beetles to adult male elands. Typical prey is medium-sized: impala, bushbuck, deer, warthog, baboons and other monkeys, hares, and birds. It hunts by a patient stalk to within a few metres, then a short rush and a killing bite to the throat or nape.

Its signature move is caching: dragging a carcass up into the fork of a tree, out of reach of lions, hyenas, and other scavengers, and returning to feed for several days.

Behaviour

Leopards are solitary and territorial. A male’s range overlaps those of several females and is marked with scent, scrapes, and a rasping call that sounds like a saw cutting wood. Individuals mostly avoid each other, communicating through markings and, near boundaries, vocal exchanges. They are active mainly at dusk and through the night, resting up in thick bush, on rock ledges, or in trees during the day.

Reproduction and life cycle

Breeding happens year-round. After a pregnancy of about 96 days, a female gives birth to two or three cubs in a den among rocks or dense vegetation and raises them alone, moving them frequently to avoid predators. Cubs begin to accompany her at around three months, learn to hunt through their first year, and become independent at 18–24 months. Cub mortality is high, with lions, hyenas, and infanticidal males the main causes.

Threats and conservation

The leopard is Vulnerable and its range is shrinking:

• Prey depletion. Bushmeat hunting empties habitat of the antelope and deer leopards need, pushing them onto livestock and into conflict.
• Retaliatory and pre-emptive killing by farmers and herders.
• Illegal trade in skins for ceremonial dress and in bones, which are increasingly substituted for tiger bone in traditional medicine.
• Habitat loss across Africa and Asia.

Because leopards are secretive and adaptable, they are often assumed to be doing fine — but region-by-region data show steep declines, and several Asian and North African subspecies are among the rarest cats on Earth.