Celebrating the Cape’s secretive leopards
~ Cederberg, September 2021 ~
We checked into the cutest little cabin home base alongside the tranquil Matjies River in a Cederberg Valley for an unforgettable heritage weekend with the Cape Leopard Trust.
We saw the Cederberg like never before.
We teamed up with Love Our Trails and the incredible Cape Leopard Trust for an exclusive, one-of-a-kind conservation-focused hiking weekend.
What did we. do?
We picked up a lot of poo!
Leopards of the Cape are notoriously elusive and shy 🐆 Only a few lucky hikers and farmers see them. So how do you study such a secretive animal in such a vast and untamed mountainous landscape?
You need people nuts enough (US! and our plucky community) to pick up their poo, which is called scat. We collected leopard scats for dietary analyses, but since the scats serve as territorial markers, care had to be taken to collect only half of it.
Talk about a hands-on hiking experience.
All our collections were carefully marked, logged with GPS coordinates and sent to the lab so we can see what these leopards like to eat. Just like that, we walked away (see what we did. there?) as citizen scientists.
