Read the text below.
Small numbers of leopards are returning to South Africa’s West Coast after an absence of more than 170 years. But while conservationists are celebrating, some farmers fear the re-emergence of the big cat.
Dr Bool Smuts has been involved in leopard conservation in South Africa’s Western Cape province since 2002. Smuts is General Manager of the Landmark Rewilding Trust, which has 60 camera traps in the West Coast region.
Camera trap images taken in this approximately 300,000-hectare region north of Cape Town are providing a surprising development for conservationists like Smuts.
The hunting of leopards started with European settlement in the seventeenth century and resulted in the loss of leopards in the West Coast region by the nineteenth century.
Now, probably originating from the mountainous Cederberg region to the north, leopards are returning to the West Coast region.
These camera traps are capturing images of these elusive creatures, allowing conservationists like Smuts to identify individual leopards.
“We have mounted a survey of the region, and in fact have now picked up seven individual leopards that appear to be territorial and established in the area. So, it’s not just a transient recolonization. It seems to have been a recolonization with a territorial behavior,” Smuts says.
Fewer livestock farmers and more eco-estates and conservancies have also made the region more attractive to these recolonizing leopards.
And not everyone welcomes their return.
Julian Melck’s family has farmed on Kersefontein farm, near Hopefield, since 1770. Melck is a livestock farmer and already faces the threat of losing sheep to the smaller caracal, another member of the cat family.
“Sheep is one of my favorite animals. And to see it being attacked, eaten by any predator is a source of distress to me, let alone commercial distress. It’s also a source of personal stress to me,” he says. “So, no, do not want any more predators on the farm than what we already have with the caracal.”
The Landmark Rewilding Trust and another NGO work with livestock farmers to mitigate the risk of livestock predation by leopards.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.