After no Sightings in Recent History Leopards Make Return

Liwonde National Park; Google it, and it looks like heaven. It’s hard to believe that up until 2015, the area was a brutal poaching ground that decimated endemic wildlife populations.

Due to their vulnerability to snares and the obliteration of their prey species, leopards were among the species most affected by the relentless onslaught of poaching in the Liwonde area.

The result: no leopard sighting for the past 25 years. Yes, leopards are naturally extremely shy animals, and that is especially true when the cats associate human beings with danger. However, Liwonde National Park is the most popular in the country, so if they were around, the cats were bound to make some form of presence.

2015 marked a huge turning point in the history of Liwonde (declared a National Park in 1973 by the chief after which the park is named). It was in August that year that African Parks assumed management of Liwonde.

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African Parks instantly instilled drastic measures to combat poaching and took many incremental measures to ultimately alter the destiny of the park. Thousands upon thousands of snares were removed, and hundreds of kilometres of electric fencing were erected to combat human-wildlife conflict in the surrounding areas.

Liwonde
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In 2018, the first predator population project kicked off. Both lions and cheetahs were reintroduced to the park, and only a couple of years later, the first lion cubs were born. It certainly was a heart-filled story of tremendous success.

With nothing but cause for celebration in all of the park’s restoration efforts, there was still a massive missing piece to the puzzle, and that was leopards. With so much focus on other efforts, and with their local population believed to be completely extinct, all leopard projects had to be sidelined or delayed.

However, before leopard efforts could even begin, positive signs emerged from a massive expansion project involving a neighbouring dry forest. In 2018, the management of the adjacent Mangochi Forest Reserve was integrated with Liwonde and African Parks, expanding the protected area by over 60%.

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With the expansion came new areas for conservationists to study, and with the studies came signs of a fragmented leopard population. As fractured as the population may have been, and even with no conclusive evidence of their existence, the small findings remained huge. People now had hope, and that was so much more than anything they had before.

Extensive monitoring efforts and long-term camera trapping projects kicked off in the forest after the expansion. It took years, and much doubt, but it finally happened. It was all for a couple of seconds, but for the teams on the ground, it was well worth all the countless hours of monitoring, because finally it was confirmed.

A leopard was caught on a camera trap; a miracle which they now had evidence to prove. The moment couldn’t have been bigger for the Liwonde National Park conservation team. The official park page shared the following post recently:

“For some time, park management had suspected a small, elusive leopard population in Mangochi Forest Reserve, but lacked solid evidence to confirm it. To investigate, the park partnered with the U.S. Forest Service to deploy camera traps in the reserve. Late last year, as seen in the photo, a leopard sighting was finally captured in Mangochi Forest Reserve.”

“It’s also important to note that Mangochi Forest Reserve is a contiguous protected area to Liwonde National Park, and both are managed under the same agreement by African Parks.”

“Are we the big five now?”

This was an incredible moment in a truly remarkable story.