Cape Leopard Trust camera survey captures rare leopard footage in Piketberg Mountains
The survey consisted of 74 paired camera stations spanning roughly 1500 km2 of mostly unprotected mountainous habitat interspersed with agricultural land, resulting in a total of 154,000 images.
CapeTalk's Clarence Ford speaks to Jeannie Hayward from the Cape Leopard Trust about their latest survey.
Listen below:
The Cape Leopard Trust (CLT) runs surveys of Leopards in the mountain regions of the Western Cape to better understand the movements and population count of Leopards for each area.
The most recent survey was conducted in the Piketberg and Olifantsrivier Mountains.
How it works...
Game cameras are set up in strategic spots which capture the movements of animals in the area.
This survey consisted of 74 paired camera stations spanning roughly 1500 km2 of mostly unprotected mountainous habitat, interspersed with agricultural land, resulting in a total of 154,000 images.
The cameras are then collected, and the process of identification can begin.
This survey captured these highlights:
Thirty-one wild mammal species were identified, including aardwolf, aardvark, Cape fox, striped polecat, and even an African snake weasel and black-backed jackal.
The cameras also recorded several bird species, including spotted eagle-owl, jackal buzzard, rock kestrel, purple and grey heron, a spotted thick-knee and a pied kingfisher.
The survey recorded leopards at 54 out of the 74 camera locations, while a total of 45 different adult cats were identified.
These observations help with research and encourage reporting and the prevention of livestock losses by predators.
The result shows...
Leopards are 'surviving' in the mountains of the Cape, as they have been for years.
A standout moment for Hayward from the survey was seeing more than one leopard on camera.
Typically, leopards spend their lives alone, and the only time you see two leopards together is when it's a mother with a cub, which is also a rare sight.
However, in this survey, a rare moment caught three hours of two leopards' mating behaviour on camera.
"It was absolutely amazing and we are out of our skins with excitement."
- Jeannie Hayward, Cape Leopard Trust
"The reason why we're doing these surveys is to get a number of density estimates over time, and then we can see whether the population is decreasing, increasing or just stable."
- Jeannie Hayward, Cape Leopard Trust
"This specific survey, most of it was on unprotected land, so a high-species diversity is really promising and encouraging... it shows that there's a lot of diverse wildlife and even though it's unprotected land, you still have this richness of species occurring in the landscape."
- Jeannie Hayward, Cape Leopard Trust
"One of the main things to determine whether leopards can survive in an area is adequate habitat and adequate prey... so for us seeing a good number of porcupines, klipspringers, Cape grysbok... those are promising signs because those are the leopard's main prey items but they are opportunistic hunters and predators... so there are some conflicts but when natural prey is in abundance, conflict with leopards are really not that high."
- Jeannie Hayward, Cape Leopard Trust
To see the survey results in photo form, visit Cape Leopard Trust's website.
Or, follow them on social media at @capeleopardtrust.
Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the full conversation.