AHMEDABAD: When survival demands new rules of coexistence, wildlife finds remarkable ways to adapt. Cat News, a newsletter of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has documented a female leopard raising her cubs in an abandoned farmhouse in Vansda town of Navsari district. The case highlights how big cats are adjusting to human-dominated landscapes.
The story began in Feb 2022 when local residents spotted a leopard in their backyard. A research team discovered that the leopard had given birth to two cubs in a dump site surrounded by bushes.
As curious onlookers began gathering at the site, the mother leopard relocated her one-month-old cubs to the room in the farmhouse for some much-needed privacy.
What’s more, the cubs grew up becoming familiar with the hustle and bustle of urban life and were captured on camera scaling a wall alongside a busy road in the vicinity of their birthplace.
The researchers, Mohmadnavaz Dahya, Rohit Chaudhry, Aadil Kazi and Alkesh Shah, documented the entire journey of a female leopard rearing cubs in the human-dominated landscape of Vansda town. The study was published in Cat News this month under the title: “A Note on Female Leopard Rearing Cubs in the Human Dominated Landscape of Vansda Town.”
Dahya said, “In Feb 2022, a resident of the Nirman Road area informed us that he had sighted a leopard in his backyard. We went to the area and installed camera traps. Despite deploying three camera traps to monitor the leopard’s movements, we could not capture any footage. Since we had no visual documentation even after 72 hours, we decided to look for indirect evidence and we found pugmarks and leopard scats.”
‘Leopard moved her cubs to abandoned farmhouse’
They finally located the female leopard in the bushes accompanied by two cubs, approximately one-month-old.
The research team tracked the family’s movements through camera traps and CCTV footage. The leopard mother showed remarkable adaptability, explains Dahya.
“When human interference became too much, she moved her cubs to a cattle fodder storage room near a sugarcane field, about 500m from the original site. Later, in March 2022, the leopards were observed at another location approximately one kilometre from their initial shelter. The area, home to about 250 houses, became an unlikely nursery for the wild cats.”
These days, the leopard and her cubs are sighted about 4km from Vansda town.
“We are constantly monitoring the movement of the cubs and the female. The cubs, who are nearly two years old, are spotted in the same locality where they were born and seem to have learned how to live amid humans. Recently, they were sighted near the farmhouse in the sugarcane field and were even spotted perched on a boundary wall, watching vehicles passing by,” said Dahya.
This unusual case study comes amid the growing leopard population in Gujarat. The state ranks second in India with 2,274 leopards, up significantly from 1,395 in 2016.
South Gujarat, where these leopards were spotted, has seen the highest increase of 145.5%, with the leopard population rising from 211 to 518.
The study appears in the latest edition of Cat News, the newsletter of the IUCN SSC Cat Specialist Group, a component of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission.