Chapter Eight
Panthera Pardus
I cannot imagine that there has been as much confusion in early attempts at categorizing an animal as there appears to have been with the leopard! Body sizes, tail lengths and colouration have all been issued as “proof” of different types of these fascinating cats. In Guy Coheleach’s magnificent book ‘The Big Cats’, he mentions that in Imperial Rome, cheetahs at one time were known as ‘Panthera’ and leopards as ‘Pardus’ and were thought to be female and male respectively, of the same species! Clearly the Romans’ debaucherous parties and gargantuan consumption of the grape, dimmed their powers of observation. These folks even thought that a young male lion, still sporting his youth-spots, was a cross between a lion and old Pardus!
All reference books spend at least a page describing the leopard. “Short legs, spotted coat” etc, etc. Everyone reading this book will know what a leopard is so I can skip that part. But I can’t resist putting this down -from Richard D. Estes the Safari Companion – “The embodiment of feline beauty, power, and stealth”. My sentiments exactly!
Distribution
For the umpteenth time, I have to mention the leopard’s adaptability – his tolerance for an amazing variety of completely different terrains. Leopards are found throughout Asia Minor, India, South East Asia, north over theHimalayas, through Tibet, China and into Siberia. This carefully shaded map is interesting, but it’s just paper. Close your eyes and think again, about Tibet, about South East Asia, about Siberia. We are talking about towering, stark, snow-swept mountains – we are talking about thick dripping Cambodian jungles, bamboo-clicking Chinese wilderness – and the leopard is surviving today, in all of them, but without help, without a drastic change in how leopard populations are managed, the leopard will gradually disappear.
Like the other great cats, the leopard’s range has been drastically reduced by humans but not to the same degree as the lion, thanks to his versatility – his adaptability. The place where he has been dealt the biggest impact is in North Africa where he is just about extinct.
For many years Zimbabwe has enjoyed healthy leopard populations. These beautiful predators have survived throughout most of the country, from the towering misty peaks of the Nyanga Mountains in the eastern highlands, all the way to the flat dry thorn-land in the west on the Botswana border. But things have drastically changed in Zimbabwe in recent years. The leopard has been taken right to the brink of disaster, and drastic measures would be needed in order to halt its rapid slide into the endangered levels.
Social and Mating
Leopards are solitary creatures but there is still a loose association between leopard operating in the same areas. Females may well be related like a lion pride. Males should be unrelated as they move into and establish themselves in new areas. Although there is little frequent meeting and greeting between adult leopard, except during courtship and mating, there is no doubt that through scent marking and vocalisation, leopard keep in touch with each other, even if this is an opposing association. Basically, they only socialise with one another for the purposes of breeding and when a mother is caring for her cubs. They are territorial animals with large variations in the size of their home ranges. The size of these ranges is influenced and dictated by the scarcity or abundance of food and cover. These home ranges often overlap – I quote from Richard D. Estes – “Great differences in home range size, even in the same locale, demonstrated in Tsavo National Park, where ten radiocollared leopards that were tracked for three years lived in areas of 3.5 to 24 square miles. Their ranges overlapped by up to 70%; each leopard used only half its range at a time. Male ranges may overlap several female ranges. In Serengeti National Park an adult male and three females hunted the same three mile stretch of river, each independently”.
According to Guy Coheleach in “The Big Cats” – “females do not seem to defend a territory and thus may share overlapping ranges, while the males’ ranges do not overlap each other, suggesting that the males may be territorial”.
I have mentioned elsewhere that Graham and I carried out a detailed marking exercise on the 1:50 000 maps which we keep in both of our camps. This exercise lasted two years. Every time we identified a fresh leopard track, we marked it with a coloured pin on the map and marked down the information which was pertinent to that track. For example “21 June large male, going east”. “15 July, large female and one cub, crossing Simukwe from south to north”. After several months a definite pattern began to emerge, and after two seasons we had a pretty good idea as to the size of the home ranges of our cats.
Our information corresponded with what Coheleach had to say in that the males are definitely territorial. Our dominant male Matobo leopards held a definite home territory which they marked and defended, and this territory overlapped, or encompassed the territories of two, and sometimes three females.
Nearly every book I have read covering the leopards’ mating habits states that leopards mate and have cubs all year round. Estes – “Reproduction is unseasonal”. Coheleach – “Leopards do not breed in a particular season”. Our observations showed a different pattern. While I acknowledge that it is physically possible that Matobo leopards can come into oestrus, and breed at any time during the year, our cats definitely have a peak, or “more active” breeding season. It is a simple matter to detect when two leopards are mating. You see their spoor together on the dusty farm roads, riverbeds and game trails. We dread going up to an eaten bait and finding two sets of adult tracks – we are trying to take the male, and sexing leopard at a hundred yards is no easy thing. But when the cats are mating they are very active, covering a lot of ground, drawing new males in, and they are also very vocal at this time – which helps us decide where to place baits or look for tracks. Our Matobo leopards mate from May through July. Looking back over our records through the years, we note that we have had more successful leopard hunts in those months than at any other time during the year. Why would there be a peak in those months? My personal theory is as follows: The female conceives, let us say, in mid May, she is then pregnant for approximately ninety days. That means she gives birth about mid August. She nurses the cubs until they are about three months old when they are now big enough to start following her; they are big enough to start learning how to hunt. This puts the date at around the end of November. This is when life starts in the southern African bush. The rains come and the antelope drop their young. What better time to learn to hunt than when there are plenty of new babies around? Impala, duiker, kudu, all drop their young in November and December.
Nils Kure wrote a fascinating, complete study of leopards in the Mala Mala game reserve in South Africa called “Living with Leopards”. In this book, along with numerous outstanding photographs of leopards engaged in every one of life’s functions, he has a very detailed chapter on mating. He mentions that in all his observations he never saw a male initiate the act of mating, it was always the female. I found that fact interesting. Estes says that the female comes into oestrus for about seven days and this state will recur again after 25 to 58 days if the female does not conceive. Nils Kure’s observations at Mala Mala show that a mating pair are only together from 1 to 4 days. All of our observations at Marula suggested that mating cats usually spent about a week together.
I found one particular paragraph pertaining to mating leopards in Nils Kure’s book, particularly interesting. “It seems certain that a dominant male leopard controls the matings within his territory. In one instance, the Chellahanga female, who was with the Jakkalsdraai male at the time, left him in response to the Mlowathi males calling. She went far out of her territory and into that area where the Mlowathi male was making inroads on the Jakkalsdraai male’s territory”. So here we can see that a dominant male (the Mlowathi male) was able to call this “hot” female into his area.
The leopards gestation period is from 90 to 100 days and two cubs are usually born. I believe that in the Matobo, most of the time, both cubs will survive. This is due to an abundance of good safe cover, plenty of food, in the form of small antelope, monkeys and hyraxes all found in good numbers around the hills, and also, because of the absence of large numbers of other predators.
Sure, there are snakes, jackals and a few hyenas around, but there are no lions and large populations of hyena and wild dogs to threaten the cubs. We often come across a mother’s tracks followed by the smaller tracks of both her two growing cubs.
Leopards are weaned at about three months, but they still depend on their mother for food for more than a year. At about two years the mother will push the cubs out of her area if they have not already left of their own accord. They can now fend for themselves but they have to tread carefully and often wander long distances trying to find a new unoccupied home territory, but as mentioned previously, there appears to be a loose association between individuals, possibly even some tolerance of young males by their sire, during the break-away period.
The leopard is sexually mature at about 24 months old. The female can mate as soon as she is physically able, but the young male will usually have to wait until he has established his own territory, as a dominant male will kill him if he is found hanging around one of the receptive girlfriends.
The female leopard, barring a condition called ‘false oestrus’, will not come into season again until the second year. For example, if she fell pregnant in early May 2000, she will give birth in early August and will suckle her cubs until early November and then teaches them to hunt and look after themselves throughout 200l. By May 2002, she will be ready to fall pregnant once more.
Size of the Leopard
This is the part where most hunters perk up the interest level; and this is the subject that most of the “untruths” and exaggerations are woven around. But it works the other way too. A lot of reference books are too conservative in talking about leopard sizes. I think it can be summed up thus – most hunters’ accounts make the leopard bigger than it is, and most reference books make the leopard smaller than it is.
Tony De Almeida wrote a book called “Jaguar Hunting in the Mato Grosso and Bolivia”. Any hunter who loves to hunt the big cats should not be without this book. It is an exciting, accurate, no-frills account of hard hunting in rugged conditions.
Tony De Almeida hits the nail exactly on the head with these words – “The length of cats, measured in a straight line between pegs driven into the ground at the nose and the tip of the tail, is a subjective measurement, to say the least, since it is always taken by the shooter of the trophy himself, and, of course, once the animal is skinned, this measurement cannot be repeated. Actually, neither skull measurement nor length is the best indication of a cat’s actual size, although for reliable records, skull measurements must prevail. The best gauge of proportions of a cat is his weight. Here we run into trouble. Few guides or hunters carry scales into the field. Usually the weight of any animal is “estimated”. This euphemism signifying that no value at all can be attached to the figure given.
Years of talking to clients and hearing about the sizes and weights of animals they have shot have permitted us to classify them into two categories. In the first are those who make an honest attempt to correctly gauge the weights of their cats; they usually overestimate weights by 30 to 50 percent, depending on their previous experience in weighing animals. In the second category are those who are not concerned with a correct weight at all but who merely wish to impress their friends and the fellow members of the safari club back home; they overestimate weights by anything from a conservative 80 percent to as much as 200 percent. Most of these people, of course, realise that they are talking rot but are forced into a vicious circle: Their estimations of weight are nothing more than a question of keeping up with Jones, whocame back from his African safari saying he shot a 350kg lion”.
Whilst I have never heard of a cat’s weight exaggerated by two hundred percent, I frequently hear exaggerations of around fifty percent. The euphoria and excitement that erupts when a nice leopard is taken, is understandable. When a nice male leopard is taken by an outfit that takes very few leopards, the event is cataclysmic. Couple that event with a few silvery-tongued loquacious PHs and voila! You have a 220-pound leopard!
When we bump into PHs from certain companies well known to us, it is standard procedure to be told by them at the Bulawayo airport that the safari has just produced a 200-pound cat. Graham and I look at each other immediately every time we hear these stories and usually he follows it up with some sarcastic comment like: “We need to move our operation from Marula to so and so’s area. The cats we’re shooting are just too small!”
Where do we start in tackling the truth of the leopard’s size?
Let’s kick off with what some of the boffins say:
2004 Carnivore Preservation Trust 85 – 125 pounds
Estes – The Safari Companion 77 – 143 pounds
Coheleach – The Big Cats 55 – 100 pounds
Encyclopaedia Zimbabwe (Quest Publishing) 134 pounds
Meinertzhagen (1938, avg of 6 mature males – Kenya) 138 pounds
Pienaar (1969) 129 pounds
Generally, not very impressive. But when talking about leopards, we are generalising, lumping many different groups, or subspecies, into one box, and that I believe (hunters’ exaggerations aside), is what creates these big discrepancies.
In the Chunya Game Management Area in southwestern Tanzania, I took the complete quota of five animals in 1996. All five leopards were fully mature males in their prime, or just past their prime. The biggest of these cats we estimated at 130 pounds. The other four were all around the 110 to 125 pound mark. From nose to tip of tail, only one was close to 7 feet, the others were all about six-and-a-half feet in length. The tails of these animals averaged 31 inches. Why are they so small there? I do not know. I killed four magnificent lions, all huge bodied, in the same area that year, so it wasn’t as if wildlife there was stunted. The buffalo were also giants. But I do not want to inadvertently give the impression that all Tanzania leopards are small. Tanzania is a big country. I have seen photographs of huge cats taken off Mount Meru’s slopes, and from the Lake Burigi area on the western border with Rwanda.
I have read several writings on the Cape leopard which frequents the Groot Swartberge and Nuweveld Mountains at Africa’s southern tip, and these cats are also small, a “big” male not much more than 100 pounds.
Even in Zimbabwe, leopards vary greatly in size and when I make that statement, I am comparing cats of the same sex and similar age. I have found the leopard in the Zambezi Valley are smaller than most other populations in the country. In my opinion, based on 27 years of hunting them, and on personal research, the biggest leopards in Zimbabwe are found in the south eastern Lowveld, the Matobo Hills and a belt of country stretching from Turk Mine, north of Bulawayo, westwards, to the Gwaai river in the Khami district. I have read in several places that leopards found in northern Iran are supposed to be the largest subspecies in the world. In Tony De Almeida ‘s book he says “D. Laylin, engaged in a program for trapping leopards in Iran and transferring them from one region to another, told me that the largest male they caught, weighed Just over 176 pounds”. I don’t know how many cats D. Laylin trapped, but I can say without hesitation, that if this 176 pounder was top of the pile, then Panthera pardus Matobo is the King – they are a lot bigger than the supposed largest subspecies – the Iranian cat.
I quote further from Tony de Almeida’s book.
“T. Sanchez-Arino and W. Bigi (personal communication) during 1983-84 weighed twelve male Leopards from the Loliondo region of Tanzania. Their average weight was 136.4 pounds (62 kilos) and the largest leopard of the twelve – scaled 173.8 pounds (79 kilos). Sanchez-Arino said that this was the biggest leopard he had ever seen, out of the nearly 130 shot by him or his clients in different parts of Africa over thirty-five years.”
The summary of these findings reveals two facts. One, that the 220-pound leopards one regularly hears about at the airport are mostly the figment of active imaginations, and two, there appears to be more large leopard, over 150 pounds, found in the Matobo Range than anywhere else.
Graham’s father, Bill Robertson, kept records of many of the male leopards which succumbed to his counter measures of traps and poison over the years. He found that most of the mature males were in the 140 to 150 pound range. Very few broke that barrier. Of course he was not trophy hunting, so if his actions accounted for a dozen or so cattle killers over a three or four year period, maybe only a few of these would be large mature males.
There are always exceptions, just like there are short and tall people, but we have found that the average size of what we call a “good” or “big” male leopard in the Matobo Hills has the following measurements-
Tip of nose to end of tail – 86″
Length of tail – 36″
Circumference at base of tail – 9″
Circumference of cat around stomach – 37″
Circumference of cat around chest – 35″
Circumference of neck – 23″
Circumference of head behind ears – 23″
Circumference of head in front of ears – 24″
Height at shoulder – 26″
Circumference of forearm – 12″
Weight -150 to 160 pounds
I once took a cat with a tail of 42″. In 2006 I took a beautiful heavy Tysonheaded cat with an unusually short tail of 31″. Quite a big variation.
The heaviest cat I have ever weighed was 187 pounds and that cat had nothing in its stomach. I have taken two others which I kick myself for having not weighed – both of these I believe could have gone to two hundred or very close to it. The cat that Graham took with Dan Dickey, which became the Zimbabwe record, weighed 196 pounds with just a little meat in its stomach.
Just because I have never seen, or weighed a 200-pound leopard, does not mean that they are not out there. Thousands of leopards have been taken over the years and I have no doubt that several of them weighed over 200 pounds, but these monsters are not nearly as common as all the stories would have us believe.
When we first started taking big leopard in 1987, a 16″ skull was quite a big deal. In fact I took one around 17″ with a hunter named Gene Yap, which went into the record books at about number ten or so. Now, twenty years later, that leopard has been pushed way down the rankings. 16″ is no longer the big deal it was in the 1980’s.
To measure a cat’s skull you have to boil, clean and dry the skull. Once this is done, you seat the lower jaw in its correct place and lay the cleaned skull on a flat surface. Using callipers, you then measure the length of the skull, and then you add that measurement to the width of the skull. These two measurements added together make the magic number.
Since those early days in the eighties, I have taken nine leopard with skulls that measured over 17″. These were monsters. But those measurements paled when levelled against Graham’s 18 ½” giant. Graham told me that the head on that leopard appeared too big for the cat’s body, and looking at the photos, I believe he is correct. Of course that leopard is a beauty in anyone’s language but the head does look slightly out of proportion to the body. Point here, is you could have a 180-pound leopard with a 17-inch skull, and you could have a 180-pound leopard with a 16-inch skull. What makes these, or any leopard, bigger or smaller than their relatives?
Firstly, I believe there has to be a correct ratio of leopard to habitat. Too few leopard, and you will eventually have too much interbreeding, stunting growth. Too many leopard, and the food supply will not be sufficient to grow big healthy cats. Secondly, I believe that the abundance and quality of foodstuffs can influence growth, and also, the degree of ease or difficulty in acquiring that food must also count.
Colouration
The second Matobo leopard I took, with a hunter from the east coast named Jerry Lee, back in 1985, had markings which were unfamiliar to me. Admittedly, at that time I had not examined many leopard skins but when I thought about the dead leopards I had seen up at the Landreys’ concession in Matetsi and the full-mounts I had stared at in Coffin Grey’s Taxidermy in Bulawayo, I realised that these markings on Jerry Lee’s cat were different. How strange that the first big male I ever took in the Matobo, this one of Jerry Lee’s, had the most clear pronounced example of what we would later know as “mountain type” colouring!
But the excitement of taking leopards, the excitement and hustle and bustle of the growing of our business, far overshadowed any interest I may have had in any differences in colouration in the cats we were taking. It was only when we returned to the Matobo, when we set up our camp on AJ Bradnick’s ranch and began to enjoy regular success on our leopard hunts, that we began to notice these variations. I collected up all the good clear photographs of leopard that we had scattered about and had many of them enlarged, laid them out side by side, and the differences in types of markings were as clear as day.
Excitedly, I rushed out and collected all the reference books I could find on leopard. Surely we had a “new” subspecies here? Of course it turned out that scientists had noted, and had been pondering over the differences in leopard markings for hundreds of years. An English naturalist, R. I. Pocock, produced many fascinating studies on the world’s wild cats between 1907 and 1932, and I found several essays on colouration variation attributed to him.
This comes from Coheleach – “In the African leopards, Pocock has found a clear correspondence between the principal colour variations and the specific environment. The leopards of the savanna or veld are yellowish tawny brown, and the leopards of the tropical rain forests are darker and duskier. On the basis of the geographical distribution of these colour variations, as well as overall size, Pocock has recognised a large number of subspecies – 11 subspecies of Asiatic leopards and 17 subspecies of African leopards. Recent lists, however, generally recognise fewer subspecies, many of which are still unverified because of the lack of sufficient material to assess the variation”.
This comes from Catfolk Species Accounts: Leopard (Panthera pardus) (Sub-Saharan Africa) “Coat colour and patterning are broadly associated with habitat type. Pocock (1932) found the following trends in colouration for leopards in Africa:
Savanna leopards – rufous to ochraceous in colour;
Desert leopard – pale cream to yellow-brown in colour, with those from
cooler regions being more grey;
Rainforest leopard – dark, deep gold in colour;
High mountain leopards – even darker in colour than 3.
So having digested all this, it was obvious to me that the beautifully marked cats we were seeing in the Matobo Hills had their colouring and rosette patterns adapted by evolution to suit their surroundings. Darker shadows and thick cover in the hills – as opposed to more open dry yellow grasslands. I carried out further investigation, harassing taxidermists and other professional hunters so I could compare and photograph as many different leopards skins as possible.
Like zebra, if you look carefully at leopard skins, they are all different. In Zimbabwe alone we notice variations in both “ground colour” and “rosette pattern” but basically it seems there are two main types. We called them “savannah colouring” and “mountain type colouring”. Savannah skins are a pale yellow with smaller rosettes. The savannah rosettes are mostly “broken” or “open” rosettes. Each rosette is made up of three to five separate dots, sometimes touching one another, sometimes not. These rosettes on savannah skins are more numerous than the rosettes on mountain type skins.
Mountain type skins are more colourful, more striking, and they resemble jaguar colouring in many instances. The background on these cats is usually a richer gold colour, often becoming a darker rufous ochre on the back. The rosettes are fewer and bigger. Also, rosettes which are “closed” are more numerous on these mountain type leopard. By “closed”, I mean that they form a complete circle, or ring of black, and often the fur inside this ring is of a slightly darker hue than the overall “base” or background colour of the cat. Another noticeable feature of these beautiful pelts is that they have more big, solid black markings than savannah skins, mostly along the spine and base of tail area, and on the stomach.
I have only ever found this “mountain type” colouring in the Matobo hills. I have found “savannah” skins on leopard I have taken in the south eastern Lowveld, Chewore in the Zambezi Valley, Matetsi near Victoria Falls, Mberengwa, Shangani, the Kariba Basin, Beitbridge, Nyamandhlovu and Lonely Mine. Further afield I have taken these cats in Northern Masailand near Lake Natron, southern Masailand at Talamai, the Chunya area in south western Tanzania, and in the Selous Game Reserve. They are far more common than the “mountain type” skins.
Not all Matobo cats have this mountain colouring though. About one third of the leopard we take in our Matobo areas are “savannah” cats, the rest sport the beautiful gold and black of the “mountain” type.
I was recently on safari in the Magudu area south of Pongola in northern KwaZuluNatal, not far from the Swaziland border. On that safari I had the opportunity to see a huge male leopard in the wild at about ten yards! He was a beauty, with a big flappy dewlap hanging from his thick neck. This big boy also had a very light coloured coat with small savannah rosettes.
This would be incomplete if I did not mention the black leopard. In “The Panthers and Ounces of Asia” Pocock 1930 – he states “The frequency with which the black variety of leopard occurs is quite different in Africa and Asia. The black form is common in southern India and frequent in Java and the southern parts of Malaysia. In contrast, it is infrequent in Africa, except in the Ethiopian highlands, where most individuals are melanistic”.
I once had the opportunity to see a melanistic leopard. It was in an enclosure in the Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage outside Bulawayo. This animal I think, had come from Ethiopia. It was beautiful and when it stood in the sunlight, we could see the rosette pattern underneath its black coat. Very unusual. I have only heard of one sighting of a wild black leopard in Zimbabwe and that was in the late 1980s in Chewore. One of the professional hunters there reported seeing a fairly small black leopard cross the road in the evening, in front of their Land Cruiser.
Populations and Home Ranges
The following factors all seem to influence the size of a leopard’s home range- availability of food, availability of good cover, persecution by man, and abundance of large predators, e.g. lion. But, the most important factor seems to be the leopard’s territorial requirements – which is not influenced so much by the food base, but by the number of females a male can cover. Our own private study was initiated for several reasons. With every year that passed, after the end of the Rhodesian war, commercial interest and participation in hunting safaris grew. When the economic meltdown became a new factor from about 1998 onward, many people including some farmers, had to shut down their businesses, they were simply not viable any longer. Many of these people then entered the safari industry. This growth in the industry led to the “opening up” of new areas, and this, coupled with the advent of hound hunting resulted in a surge of successful leopard hunts in the Matobo range. Several of us were concerned that too many leopard were being taken out of the district. The first hurdle in trying to find an answer was to try to establish how many leopard actually lived in this area.
I read everything I could get my hands on which covered leopard home ranges. But most studies I found had been carried out in the plains of East Africa – in very different country to the Matobo hills. Theodore Bailey carried out a very detailed study in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, and in that study (The African Leopard, 1993) he said – “the home ranges of adult male leopards varied between 16.4 and 96.1 sq kilometres and were much larger than adult females. Unlike females, adult males moved rapidly from one end of their range to the other in predictable patterns”.
Graham grew up on Garth Farm and I had hunted it for many years, so between us our knowledge of his twelve thousand acres was intimate. We already had a good idea of how many leopard lived on the farm but we decided to go ahead with the map marking project anyway.
Very quickly, we ran into problems. Unfortunately leopards don’t utilise our fences and maps to demarcate their home ranges! They use urine and a series of grunting calls, so inevitably, our cats’ areas encompassed other peoples’ properties as well. Obtaining permission to go onto these neighbouring properties was not difficult but our hunting operations did not take us onto these other farms regularly, so our information on leopard movements there was sketchy. However, we managed to convert our information into home range diagrams which we believed were fairly accurate.
Another problem was the identification of spoor. Different types of ground structures portray the same leopard track differently. Loose sand and mud cause the leopard’s foot to splay open, thereby exaggerating its size, so if one hunter saw a certain male’s track in loose sand in a dry riverbed, it would look different to the same leopard’s track seen by another hunter on a dry hard road. Furthermore, I might see a mature male track in a certain place, and later, at camp, ask Graham if he knows anything about that male. He may answer – “No, I didn’t see that male track, but I saw a female track near that place yesterday”.
So now we would be unsure, we wouldn’t know if the track we saw had been made by the same leopard, or by two different cats. To overcome this problem of track identification we decided to measure the tracks as accurately as possible. This worked perfectly. It not only helped us decide if we had seen the tracks of the same leopard but it became a way of “gauging” the size of a leopard and this helped us to decide whether to bait him, or if he had eaten a bait, whether we should sit for him or not. More of this measuring technique shortly.
After two years we were able to conclude the following information on Graham’s twelve thousand acres.
- A big dominant male had a home area of about twelve thousand acres, two thirds of which fell on Graham’s property.
- Another male, slightly smaller, had a home range to the west of Graham’s property and one third of that home range merged onto Graham’s ranch.
- The big male’s area covered the territories of three females.
- Two of the females were large and mature whilst the third appeared to be a younger animal.
- One of the big females had a cub which occasionally followed her.
- The females’ territories were about 3.5 thousand acres in extent. A few times a year, maybe three or four times, a giant male came right across the eastern half of the ranch in front of the camp to the Mangwe Pass and then would disappear again. We named him ‘Smiths Block’ after the ranch to the east of us where he appeared to have his home. Every year one, and sometimes two, unknown males would come onto the property for a few days. I felt certain that these incursions were the result of females coming into heat. In 2004 I took one of these trespassers very near to camp, and he was a beauty. This leopard is the one mentioned in “Last Day Plus One.”
- We further concluded that in any seven days throughout the year, we could find the fresh tracks of five different leopards on Graham’s twelve thousand acres. Usually three female tracks and two male tracks. Even with this information it was impossible to extrapolate our findings to the leopard population in the district. Some areas, like private ranch land, where the farmers were resident and active in anti-poaching activities, we classed as “good” game and leopard areas. Other areas where poaching was a problem but good cover was evident and some small game still existed, we called “possible” areas, and then there were areas like sparsely populated communal lands where resident game had been poached out. These areas occasionally had transient leopards through them, and we branded these “poor” areas.
We lacked the time, drive, funding and co-operation to mount any more detailed studies on the leopard populations of western Matobo, but we’d made a start.
About twelve miles north of Garth Farm, towards Marula, is a ranch called Stone Hills. This was once an overgrazed cattle farm which was lovingly turned into a top game sanctuary by Richard and Bookey Peek. Richard has a degree in zoology and he served with the Rhodesian Department of Parks and Wildlife for fourteen years. He has also been the owner of the biggest taxidermy business in the country as well as the curator of mammals in the National Museum, so he is an authority on wildlife and wildlife management. Bookey is an accomplished travel writer and author and qualified lawyer who focused her energies and talents into learning about nature and developing Stone Hills into a veritable Eden.
Richard was interested and also concerned about the quota allocations and leopard populations in the district so Graham and I met with him. In his “take charge” fashion Richard drew up a plan for all of us in the district to submit various information covering leopard taken by our clients, like dates, sizes etc. I dug out all the information we had, right up to the end of 2001 and Richard entered all this on a huge map of the area. The land takeover programme accelerated in 2002. Suddenly everybody had far bigger concerns than the leopard population – like – “will my family have a home tomorrow?”
So unfortunately our whole programme went on hold. In a conservative bit of a “thumb suck” we laid guesses about our western Matobo leopard densities as follows.
Good areas – 12 000 acres would hold one dominant male. Three resident females. One cub. One “visiting male”.
Possible areas – 24 000 acres would hold one dominant male. Three resident females. One cub. One “visiting male”.
Poor areas – 60 000 to l 00 000 acres would hold one dominant male.
Three resident females. One cub. One “visiting male”.
Leopard Tracks
In order to differentiate between different leopards in our areas, we decided to measure their tracks. Graham, myself and the trackers agreed that we would not measure tracks found in mud or loose sand as these would give false, bigger measurements. Whenever possible we tried to follow or backtrack until we found spoor made in fine dust on a hard surface. Not too difficult on the network of game trails, footpaths and dirt roads on our areas. We made three measurements in inches, or eighths, and even sixteenths, of an inch. The first was from the top of the track, down longitudinally, to the bottom of the pad or “heel”. The second was the width, laterally across the widest part of the track – about the middle. The third was also a lateral measurement, this time the width of the heel, or pad at the bottom, or base of the track. We measured only a front foot track. The front feet of a predator, just like those of most other animals, are larger than the back feet. The leopard’s back feet are not only smaller than the front feet but are slightly more elongated, elliptical, than the ‘square’ looking track of the front foot, especially in females.
We found that big male leopards had tracks which measured about 4″ in length, 4″ in width and had a base measurement of 2″ to square a total of 10″. Of course leopards, like people, vary, and some left tracks for example – 4 2⁄8″, 4″, and 2 3⁄8″, for a total of 10 5⁄8″. We would be able to measure and recognize that track because of these small differences.
The biggest track I have ever seen squared 12 ¼”. I saw these on the main Mangwe-Thornville road twenty miles south of the Mangwe Pass near a big koppie called Ejime (African pronunciation of the name Jim) of course we named this cat Big Jim but we never came to grips with him. We saw histracks for about five months and then no more. He must have died a natural death of snakebite, old age, or fighting. I would have loved to have seen that leopard. The whole project became very interesting when we started measuring the tracks of all the trophy cats that came back to camp. We would take the leopard’s foot before rigor mortis set in and push it down gently onto a hard, lightly-dusted surface. After a couple of seasons of doing this, the following were the conclusions we came to:
No cat whose front foot squared under 9 ½ inches , ever made what we called “big” – or “good” (140 – 150 pounds).
We would hunt a cat whose track measured 9 ¾ inches or more.
Some giant leopards – ‘supercats’ had feet that were, surprisingly, small for their size but these tracks were never less than 10 inches square.
Even though the above was true, we never found that a small leopard carried big feet, (10 inches square and over). In other words, a good size 10 inches track, in our experience, never ever produced an inferior cat, but an average track, of 9 ¾ inches to 10 inches, occasionally produced a giant leopard.
A big male Matobo leopard, when “strolling”, has a measurement of 37 inches between one front right track and the next front right track. The measurement between his right front track and left front track was 18 inches. The measurement between the front right track to the second front left track, is 59 inches.
When “strolling” or walking slowly, a leopard’s tracks are ‘evenly spread’ – all four foot tracks are almost equidistant from one another. When the cat picks up his pace – ‘on a mission’ we call it – then the back foot tracks lay on top of, or very close to, the front track. When a leopard breaks into a run his tracks will again become well spread out, equidistant, but obviously now there will be deeper rougher markings in the ground.
Like lions, big old male leopard often “scuff’ their front feet when walking, leaving a brushed mark in front of their track. Whether they do this only when they are tired, or when they are past a certain age or weight, I do not know.
Females do not do this. Really big old males both in lion and leopard also seem to grow a lot more “spare” hair on the tops of their front feet, and this thick hair is what makes the scuff marks.
The Leopard’s Call
The most commonly used description of the leopard’s call is “like sawing a piece of wood”. If you stood a big piece of plywood, about four feet by four feet in size, on its edge and you began to saw the top edge at right angles with a regular wood saw, you would indeed produce a sound very similar to that made by a leopard.
Like lions, tigers, and jaguars, leopards are classified as one of the ‘roaring’ cats because of their ability to push out this sawing noise. It is a primal, hair raising sensation if you are ever close to a calling leopard. The closer you are, the more deep and guttural, and boar-like, the sawing grunt sounds. It seems to emanate from a deep hollow chest, much bigger than that owned by the leopard.
Very little has been written about the leopard’s call. Some believe that the call may be a way of “spacing” their areas – letting other cats know that “this area is spoken for”. After all, these cats probably do not want to risk danger and mishap by fighting all the time. It makes sense that they regularly advertise their presence so they can avoid conflict with one another.
It also seems pretty obvious that, like most other wildlife, they have different calls to attract mates and to express irritation or anger. I have never heard a leopard call on his way in to the bait. I have, however, heard them calling – sometimes continuously – as they walk away from a bait once they have discovered our presence.
In our areas in the western Matobo, the leopards are more vocal in what we believe are the “mating months” of May, June and July and we hear them regularly from our mountain camp during that period.
The call is usually a series of these sawing grunts, numbering between twelve and sixteen ‘saws’, counting the “push” and the “pull” of the saw as two calls. The two strokes have a different tone, the indrawn breath being slightly less loud than the deeper “out” breath.
After reading Tony de Almeida’s Jaguar hunting book for the umpteenth time, I decided to try to call a leopard. In the Mato Grosso the hunters use a hollowed-out gourd called a cabaca to imitate the jaguar’s call. This gourd has two holes cut into it, one larger than the other. The caller blows into the smaller hole and the call is emitted from the larger one. I saw another apparatus in Mexico, also used to call Jaguars. This too was a gourd. It was about the size of a soccer ball with a circle cut out about eight inches in diameter. All the seeds and pith had been cleaned out through this hole. The hole was covered tightly with stretched, shaved goat skin, secured over the hole with tiny wooden pegs. The caller turns the gourd so that the skin is facing the ground. Out of the centre of the skin hangs a cord of plaited horse hair about sixteen inches long. This horse hair rope is liberally covered with resin. The caller grabs the gourd’s “handle” in one hand, and then holds the horse hair rope between the thumb and forefinger of the other hand, and squeezing this rope gently, he pulls his fingers quickly and firmly down, to the end of the rope. A jaguar-like grunt is emitted.
Jaguars can be called in with these devices. De Almeida wrote a whole fascinating chapter in his book about calling these beautiful beasts and it is exciting stuff.
Leopards and Jaguars are similar in so many ways. Surely I could do the same with our Matobo cats?
I found two large gourds in a curio shop at Victoria Falls and I carefully cut a ten inch diameter hole into one of them and cleaned it out. The tone of my voice is suitable for imitating the leopards call. I have coerced lions into answering me in the still pre-dawn. This can be done by imitating their lowing call into a five gallon bucket suspended from a low branch, with about two inches of water in the bottom of the bucket. This contraption creates a kind of resonating effect and produces a tone that travels for miles. I grunted experimentally into the gourd. To me it sounded perfect. I walked about five hundred yards away from camp and called again. The trackers said it sounded exactly like a leopard!
I decided to test the call whilst hunting leopard with Dan Greene. Just as the sun went down one evening Dan and I climbed a small koppie next to a bait that we had placed in the notorious spot on the Chavakadze river. We knew that a giant cat operated here but he had not been to his watering spot in a while. Maybe we could solicit a response from him if he was in that neck of the woods.
I called intermittently for about an hour. It sounded perfect. But there was no response except the impertinent questioning bark of a juvenile baboon a couple of hundred yards away. We packed up and drove back to camp. The following day at the end of our tiring bait run, we checked the Chavakadze bait. The bait was shredded! And there, in the soft wet sand of the Chavakadze were the huge tracks of my old adversary.
Had the gourd called him in? Was he on his way here anyway? There is no way of knowing. Dan and I sat that night but that crafty old campaigner never showed himself.
In the Pantanal and the Mato Grosso the jaguar hunters use dogs to bay the jaguar. A few jaguar were shot by Tony De Almeida’s clients after they had been called right up to the hunters, but usually the gourd was used to solicit an answer from the cats so the hunters knew where to unleash the dogs in the morning.
I tried several more times to cajole an answer from a leopard but did not succeed. Busy checking baits and reacting to eaten baits, I never really have a lot of opportunity to pursue this possibility. We are very successful with the baits, so there is no real reason to continue with the calling, except for my own interest.
All our African staff and some PH’s tell me that they can tell what sex a cat is by listening to its call, but I do not believe it. We have listened to a deep gruff grunting during the night and carefully pin-pointed its direction, and then in the morning have found the tracks of a female.
Maybe, with practice, someone could become skilled enough to differentiate between male and female calls, but in my opinion they would have to listen to a lot of calls and they would have to be able to positively identify the caller each time. Just about impossible.
Prior to experimenting with the gourd, I found a fairly poor recording of a leopard grunting. I taped this call to repeat continuously every ten minutes on a cassette tape. AJ had lost two calves to a leopard about a mile west of the prominent Dombolefu Hill, but we were not in the area at the time so I promised to try for that cat when we returned. When I packed the equipment for the next safari down at the Ingwezi, I included the leopard cassette and a player.
We placed the cassette player on top of a small koppie late in the evening and camouflaged it with some leafy bushes. Next we placed four baits in a semi circle around the koppie, all linked by a blood trail. We turned the player on, switched the cassette to play continuously and drove back to camp. We figured on getting a good two or three hours out of the battery at least.
I felt there was a good chance that if a leopard was within hearing distance he would come and investigate a call that he was unfamiliar with, and hopefully he would find one of our baits.
When we arrived back at the koppie the next morning, we saw fresh leopard tracks! These were on the road about two hundred yards from the caller. We found no tracks near the cassette player and none of the baits had been touched. Peter was sceptical that the caller had worked but I was convinced. Surely it was too much of a coincidence that these tracks turned up on this road the very night that we tried the call? I believe that the cat had come to investigate the new leopard, but was just too careful, too circumspect to come any closer. Maybe he was not a big dominant male and was scared to take a bait with another male calling so close by. Maybe at close range, to the leopard’s perfect hearing, the tape was just not convincing enough.
I have heard three reports which I believe are reliable, where hunters have called in a leopard with a predator call. A leopard is a super predator and an opportunist, and eats rabbits and small antelope – why would he not come to the bleating sounds of his prey in distress?
I have tried this several times but have not met with success. When calling in our areas with a rabbit call at night, we have found that jackal, genet and occasionally a pole cat, will come quickly and aggressively to the call. Cape wild cats, serval and caracals will come within about a hundred to two hundred yards, and then sit there, usually in cover. They are more careful. Maybe this is the same with leopards.
Of course, first of all you have to have a leopard within hearing range of the call, so it’s quite likely that on occasions when we have called, we have not actually been within range of a cat in the first place.
A few years ago Graham and I put the metal frames and mattresses in a tree so that a friend of ours from the States, John Strobel, could sit for a caracal. The caracal had been using a dirt road about half a mile south of the camp quite regularly. We positioned John about a hundred yards north of the road, on the edge of which we had secured a dead guinea fowl. The following morning we left camp early to go and see how John had fared. Half a mile west, downwind of where we had left John, I got out of the vehicle to open a gate. I noticed the fresh tracks of a female leopard following the road. We drove on. Two hundred yards further, we noticed that the tracks were now splayed, running. We thought no more of it and drove on to the tree hide. John had seen no caracal, or anything else during the night. We were loading the blankets and mattresses he was throwing down to us when he mentioned that he had blown his rabbit call for about half an hour at around five o’clock that morning. Immediately my mind went back to the splayed leopard track. Peter and I walked west, back along the road until we found where the cat had turned off the road. Peter followed the spoor. It stopped running and continued in a “walk mode” to a point where Peter indicated that the leopard had crouched down, facing the tree hide! John had called in a leopard without even knowing it!
Full Moon
As the moon becomes full, so leopard activity on and around baits slumps. Why?
Like ballistics, this one is for campfire debate. Of course there are plenty of theories. But theories are just opinions. But make no error, bait activity decreases when the moon is full. That is a fact, not an opinion. I have taken several leopard during full moon, and I know a few other professional hunters who have done the same. But these few incidents were definitely exceptions to the rule.
During the week building up to the full moon, not only are the baits not hit, but leopard tracks are simply not encountered as often as they are during the rest of the month.
We have puzzled long and hard over this one. Where do the cats go? Why do they walk all over the dry riverbeds, roads and pathways for three weeks, then suddenly vanish for one? I have heard several theories, but I believe that the real reason is probably a blend, or mixture of all of them.
Plainsgame animals increase their nocturnal activity during the full moon. Most wildlife books, including R.D. Estes, tells us this, and most hunters will know about the poor game viewing days when animals are lying down in daylight hours because they have been up all night feeding. Not only plains game animals are up and about during the bright moon. Even rock dassies, which are normally totally diurnal animals, are out of their protective cracks and crevices during full moon. And in the Matobo, leopard hunt dassies. So maybe the leopard tracks are not evident all over the savannah because their owners are amongst the koppies during the full moon. Maybe leopard are more successful at hunting antelope at night, when they are grazing, than when they are lying down in the open, alert, ready for attack. Perhaps they try harder to catch fresh game during this time of easier hunting and therefore ignore the smell of our baits.
Another thing that I’m certain comes into play with our Matobo cats ‒ and in fact any leopard that lives in an area where he is persecuted by man, is the feeling of exposure. Farm leopard are about 99% nocturnal. They have become this way because of human activity. Maybe, when the moon is full this feeling of exposure persists.
Several times I have been forced to sit in a blind next to a fortress koppie – our set-up has been dictated by a cattle killer who has dragged the calf into cover up against, or inside one of these horrible places. When this has happened during the full moon we have noticed something interesting. Imagine a range of fortress koppies, about a mile long and a thousand feet high, running north-south. A calf has been killed on the east side of these hills and dragged up and eaten at the base. Your blind is a hundred and twenty yards north of this calf, also on the east side. The wind is coming gently from the southeast. Except for the worrying fact that the leopard is probably lying up in the rocks watching you, it’s not a bad set up.
It is full moon. So the big orangeness of it climbs out of the horizon at about six thirty – leopard time, just as the sun has disappeared. But no cat comes. Within an hour the heavy moon is no longer orange, it is yellow, then it is white. At 10pm you can read your book, and you can see the face of your watch. It is very, very bright. Still no one comes to claim their dinner.
If you have not done this before, you give up and climb into your blankets, before long you are snoring nicely. No leopard will come. But we have done this before. Late, between 10pm and midnight, the moon sinks west behind the range. The heavy black shadow you’ve been waiting for sweeps over the bait, blind and the bush. It is bright as day on the west side of the range and it will remain so all night. But on your side, on the east, it is black. And the big, careful calf killer comes in.
This has happened to us several times. To me, it’s proof. The leopard has waited for darkness to hide him before he comes into the kill. Why? It can only be because he feels exposed in the bright moonlight.
Once the moon has reached full, it will rise above the eastern horizon about an hour later every day, and it is waning, becoming smaller each time it comes up. If we have hunters whose safari is not dictated by time off work, or other influencing factors, we advise them to try to arrive three or four days after the full moon, this ensures that their fourteen-day safari will enjoy pitch black nights and, theoretically, lots of leopard activity.
Another thing which seems to influence leopard activity in the Matobo hills is cold “guti” weather. When the guti rolls in, especially in the colder winter months, leopard activity increases. I can only guess at the reasons. Maybe the cats need the activity of the hunt, or the meat itself, to generate warmth in their bodies – maybe it is warmer than curling up into a ball way up in the rocks. Graham always expects bad news from the cattle herders immediately after or during guti weather as this is usually when calves disappear. Not only does this low murky drizzle prompt the leopards into activity, it seems to embolden them into taking cattle during the daylight (albeit dim daylight) hours.
A Few Interesting Notes
Leopard and lion have ‘floating bones’. These bones (there are two of them) are situated on either side of the centre of the brisket, a couple of inches inside the flesh, – where the ‘collarbones’ would be if a cat had collarbones – and that’s exactly what they are. “Floating” bones are relic clavicles. Most walking mammals of reasonable size have lost the connection from the shoulder apparatus to sternum; therefore the use of the clavicle has fallen away and in many ‘advanced’ species is all but gone completely. Different carnivores show differing stages of this ‘left over’. In cats there is something more substantial although completely non functional. The added flexibility of not having a clavicle connection to the sternum allows for greater reach in fast moving animals and also a wider stretch and grasp needed for cats.
Mammals that have retained the clavicle are primates, some insectivores, bats and monotremes (platypus & echidna). Certainly for bats and primates one can see the use in retaining a brace for the flying and brachiating (swinging from limbs) locomotion. Next time you eat a roast chicken, grab the ‘wishbone’. If you cut this wishbone down the centre, where it joins, the two pieces will look a bit like a cat’s floating bones. I have seen some beautiful ladys’ jewellery fashioned out of these floating bones and the hunter should make a point of asking his guide to have themcleaned up and delivered to him.The unusual bones are also considered by hunters as lucky charms – a very good reason to make sure you keep them!
Like dogs, cats have five claws on the front feet, and four on the back feet. But that’s where similarities end. Dogs’ claws do not ‘retract’ – they are permanently on show, permanently in use – gripping the ground when running, scratching themselves, and so on – and because they are permanently in use, they are quite blunt. Grab Fluffy off the TV and give his tummy a hard tickle. You’ll see a very different set of claws. These are not running aids or flea scratchers. They are weapons. Cat’s claws are always sharp. They have to be – their main functions are snagging desperate fleeing prey, fighting, and climbing trees with more than double their own weight held firmly in the mouth.
The inside claw, which is higher up the front leg than the other four claws, is known as the “dew” claw. This claw is the biggest knife in the cat’s arsenal; it is a good third bigger than the rest of the claws, and in a big leopard, or a lion, that’s plenty big. These claws can be removed from the skin of the leopard trophy without damaging it in any way, and like the floating bones, they can be fashioned into unusual, beautiful jewellery.
