More detail of Indian Leopard
Other Facts :
The name "leopard" comes from the Greek word leopardus, which is a combination of leon (lion) and pardus (panther), according to PBS Nature.
Leopards don't need much water. They survive from the moisture they get from eating their prey.
It is no wonder that leopards are such great hunters.
They can run up to 36 mph (58 kph), jump forward 20 feet (6 meters) and leap 10 feet (3 m) straight up, according to the San Diego Zoo.
Though classified as a roaring cat, leopards usually bark when they have something to say.
Leopards' ears can hear five times more sounds that the human ear.
The leopard's spots are called rosettes because they look like roses.
The genus Leopardus does not include leopards. Members of that genus include cats of Central and South America, such as ocelots, oncillas, margays, Pampas cats, Geoffrey's cat, guiñas and Andean cats.
Indian leopard inhabits tropical rain forests, dry deciduous forests, temperate forests and northern coniferous forests but..........
In the Himalayas it is sympatric with the snow leopard up to 5,200 m (17,100 ft) above sea level.
Leopards are elusive, solitary, and largely nocturnal.
They are known for their ability in climbing, and have been observed resting on
tree branches during
the day, dragging their kills up trees and hanging them
there, and descending from trees headfirst.
They are powerful swimmers, although are not as disposed to swimming as some
other big cats, such as the tiger.
They are very agile, and can run at over 58 kilo metres per hour (36 mph),
They are very agile, and can run at over 58 kilo metres per hour (36 mph),
leap over 6 m (20 ft)
horizontally, and jump up to 3 m (9.8 ft) vertically.
They produce a number of vocalizations, including grunts, roars, growls, meows,
and purrs.
Top 5 districts that have seen
increase in leopard population.
In fact, with 1,395 leopards, the state has the second highest population of these wild cats in India after Madhya Pradesh (1,817).
Interesting story about leopard
To understand where the human-leopard relationship goes awry, Athreya
investigated a rash of attacks that occurred in the Junnar region from
2001 to 2003. In what seemed at first to be a coincidence, the forest
department had been trapping leopards, more than a hundred of them, from
problem areas in Junnar, mainly after attacks on livestock. Those
animals got released in forests an average of 20 miles from the capture
sites—a common technique for dealing with problem carnivores worldwide.
But after the relocations, Athreya and her team discovered, attacks on
humans in Junnar increased by 325 percent, and the percentage of those
attacks that were fatal doubled.
“It was a typical case of the messed-up mind of a cat,” Athreya said. Messed up, that is, by the trauma of being caught in a box trap, handled by humans, and dumped in an unfamiliar landscape and in territories already occupied by other leopards. The outbreak of attacks wasn’t, after all, a result of the leopards’ innate ferocity, according to Athreya and her co-authors: “Translocation induced attacks on people.”
Forest department managers generally got the message when Athreya first presented her research a decade ago. Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai stopped allowing itself to be used as a dumping ground for relocated leopards. (Like Junnar, it was also experiencing an outbreak of deadly attacks.) The city’s media took up the idea that relocations were more dangerous than the leopards. Workshops for apartment dwellers around the park, and for residents of slums inside the park borders, began to promulgate the larger idea that merely seeing a leopard in the neighborhood does not constitute “conflict.” Removing leopards—the first thing city dwellers often demand—disrupts the social system and opens the territory for new leopards that may be less experienced at the tricky business of “mutual accommodation.”
The workshops also emphasized the human side of mutual accommodation, including basic precautions like keeping children indoors at night. (Larger public health measures would also help, including garbage removal, provision of toilets, and removal of street dogs, but economic and political factors often put them out of reach.) The abiding message was that leopards in Mumbai, Akole, and other areas are not “strays” or “intruders.”
They are fellow residents.
Living by these ideas has not, however, always been easy. This is especially so for forest department rangers who show up in the aftermath of a leopard attack, and find themselves besieged and even beaten by enraged residents demanding action. They also come under pressure from local politicians. So the traps still come out, to give people the illusion of something being done, of safety, even if the actual result is to increase their danger. A few “problem” leopards end up being warehoused at crowded “rescue” facilities around the country, though there is in fact no way to identify a problem animal, short of catching it with its victim. A scapegoat will do.
Thus soon after the latest killings in Junnar, a forest ranger there told me: “Glad to inform you that we trapped a male leopard.” He identified it flatly as “the same leopard which attacked a boy last month.” It would spend the rest of its life at a “leopard rescue” facility in Junnar, which was already close to capacity, with 28 leopards. Most of the other leopards being caught in traps inevitably would be released, though for obvious reasons the forest department would not disclose how many leopards it was releasing in Junnar, or where. Two weeks after that, another leopard killed and dismembered a 60-year-old woman at a farm a few miles from where Sai Mandlik died.
I had seen of leopards there was a messy, difficult business, far removed from the way people live in more developed countries.
“It was a typical case of the messed-up mind of a cat,” Athreya said. Messed up, that is, by the trauma of being caught in a box trap, handled by humans, and dumped in an unfamiliar landscape and in territories already occupied by other leopards. The outbreak of attacks wasn’t, after all, a result of the leopards’ innate ferocity, according to Athreya and her co-authors: “Translocation induced attacks on people.”
Forest department managers generally got the message when Athreya first presented her research a decade ago. Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai stopped allowing itself to be used as a dumping ground for relocated leopards. (Like Junnar, it was also experiencing an outbreak of deadly attacks.) The city’s media took up the idea that relocations were more dangerous than the leopards. Workshops for apartment dwellers around the park, and for residents of slums inside the park borders, began to promulgate the larger idea that merely seeing a leopard in the neighborhood does not constitute “conflict.” Removing leopards—the first thing city dwellers often demand—disrupts the social system and opens the territory for new leopards that may be less experienced at the tricky business of “mutual accommodation.”
The workshops also emphasized the human side of mutual accommodation, including basic precautions like keeping children indoors at night. (Larger public health measures would also help, including garbage removal, provision of toilets, and removal of street dogs, but economic and political factors often put them out of reach.) The abiding message was that leopards in Mumbai, Akole, and other areas are not “strays” or “intruders.”
They are fellow residents.
Living by these ideas has not, however, always been easy. This is especially so for forest department rangers who show up in the aftermath of a leopard attack, and find themselves besieged and even beaten by enraged residents demanding action. They also come under pressure from local politicians. So the traps still come out, to give people the illusion of something being done, of safety, even if the actual result is to increase their danger. A few “problem” leopards end up being warehoused at crowded “rescue” facilities around the country, though there is in fact no way to identify a problem animal, short of catching it with its victim. A scapegoat will do.
Thus soon after the latest killings in Junnar, a forest ranger there told me: “Glad to inform you that we trapped a male leopard.” He identified it flatly as “the same leopard which attacked a boy last month.” It would spend the rest of its life at a “leopard rescue” facility in Junnar, which was already close to capacity, with 28 leopards. Most of the other leopards being caught in traps inevitably would be released, though for obvious reasons the forest department would not disclose how many leopards it was releasing in Junnar, or where. Two weeks after that, another leopard killed and dismembered a 60-year-old woman at a farm a few miles from where Sai Mandlik died.
I had seen of leopards there was a messy, difficult business, far removed from the way people live in more developed countries.
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