Leopard in Gujarat

                   Interesting Facts about Leopard  

 

 

Like human fingerprints, no two Leopard skins are identical in their markings, or rosettes. Coloration varies from the normal buff or straw-colored sleek yellow coat with black rosettes to a rich yellow orange.

Depending on the habitat. 

The spotted cat is so strong that it is capable of dragging a prey weighing as much as itself some 9m up a tree so as not to be harassed by Lions, Hyenas or Jackals. 

On the outskirts of Gir once a farmer saw a Leopard climb a coconut tree with a full grown Wild Boar's carcass. 

The leopard is very adaptable and can live in many different places across the globe. Leopards are found in sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, southwestern and eastern Turkey, in the Sinai/Judean Desert of Southwest Asia, the Himalayan foothills, India, Russia, China and the islands of Java and Sri Lanka, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). These large cats can live in almost any type of habitat, including rainforests, deserts, woodlands, grassland savannas, forests, mountain habitats, coastal scrubs, shrub lands and swampy areas. In fact, leopards live in more places than any other large cat.

Most stealthier and athletic than the other big cats, the Leopard can run, jump, swim and climb trees with wonderful ease.

Population

In 2015, 7,910 leopards were estimated to live in and around tiger habitat in India; about 12,000 to 14,000 leopards were speculated to live in the entire country. The following table gives the major leopard populations in the Indian states.

State

	Leopards (2015)
Andhra Pradesh	-  343
Bihar	-  32
Chattisgarh	-  846
Goa	-  71
Jharkhand	-  29
Karnataka	-  1,129
Kerala	-  472
Madhya Pradesh	- 1,817
Maharashtra	-  905
Odisha	-  345
Tamil Nadu	-  815
Uttar Pradesh	-  194
Uttarakhand	-  703

              

  Human and leopard

 Human-leopard  conflict  is  a  complex  issue  influenced  by  political and  social  attitudes,  the  biology  of  the  species,  and  management  action.  Effective  management  of  conflict  will  have  to  strike  a  balance  between  minimizing  serious  conflict  (attacks  on  people) 
and  the  long-term  conservation  of  the  leopard  species.  Although the  leopard  is  commoner  and  more  resilient  than  other  large  cat  species  that  occur  in  India,  it  is  poached  in  the  largest  numbers  to  meet the demand of the illegal wildlife trade (Athreya et al. 2004). The   leopard   is   very   adaptable,   and   can   live   close   to   human  
habitations

Story about leopard 

India may be the real test of survival in a crowded world—and perhaps a model for it—because leopards live there in large numbers, outside protected areas, and in astonishing proximity to people. Tolerance of leopards is also generally high, though India (and the British hunter and author Jim Corbett) largely established the term “man-eating leopard” in our vocabulary. It’s a misnomer: Women and children are the usual victims when leopards attack; size makes men more challenging. Because attacks often occur when people go into the brush to relieve themselves, men also gain an inadvertent survival advantage from being able to urinate while standing.

In any case, attacks on humans are relatively rare. It is far easier to die in India from civilization than from wildness: Nationwide 381 people are killed every day in road accidents, 80 more on rail lines, and 24 by electrocution. But leopard killings get headlines, partly because they are uncommon and also because they touch something primitive in the human psyche.

Late on a Saturday morning in May, in the Junnar countryside, 95 miles east of Mumbai, a government car pulled up at a prosperous-looking little farmhouse. The occasion was horrific and yet polite. On the large veranda in front, surrounded by a waist-high concrete wall and shaded by a metal roof, a crowd waited for the man from the forest department.

Six days earlier, at about 10:30 on a Sunday night, a two-year-old named Sai Mandlik was kneeling on a bench on this veranda and running a toy bus along the top of the wall. His grandmother relaxed on a daybed beside him. In the tall grass 20 or 30 yards away, a leopard spotted something: a head moving back and forth, not much larger than the bonnet macaques that are among its natural prey. It began to stalk. If he was lucky, the boy never saw the leopard that snatched him over the wall and carried him away through the fields. His grandmother screamed. The rest of the family came pouring out into the night. They were too late.

 

 

 

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