The Great Leopard Rescue: Saving the Amur Leopards
A male Amur leopard’s home range may cover more than 150 square miles 388 square kilometers As a cub he’d spent two years shadowing his mother and learning to hunt During the following winter he hunted with his brother and sister in their mother’s home range the area normally traveled while hunting They searched for prey on familiar ground and helped one another get enough to eat But adult Amur leopards hunt alone so in the spring the trio split up All summer long the young male wandered farther from his mother’s home range At last he found a range of his own Though he sometimes crosses paths with rivals and potential mates this part of the forest is his home Now he takes a path he’s traveled many times But before he picks up the scent of more prey the wind shifts bringing the nose stinging smell of smoke 6
Beyond the stream he’s crossing sparks dance in the air Flames crawl through tall grass and into the dead leaves littering the forest floor If this fire spreads upward into the trees the entire forest could soon be ablaze The leopard leaps over a burning patch of grass and runs for his life He has to survive The wild Amur leopard population can’t lose even one more big cat 7
on THe BrinK According to studies from the World Wildlife Fund Amur leopards are the rarest big cats on Earth These majestic predators live primarily in the far eastern part of Russia Experts believe a few more live in northeastern China and possibly even in South Korea Males and females need enough open land so their hunting ranges can overlap This ensures they can find mates to produce young 8
Amur leopards weren’t always so rare In the 1950s scientists estimated there were about twenty-four hundred wild Amur leopards in Russia which was then part of the Soviet Union a union of fifteen republics That number based on sightings and tracks in the snow was a healthy population for a cat that lives in a very limited part of the world But since then the number of wild Amur leopards recorded has dropped to about fifty With such a small population they are greatly at risk of becoming extinct gone forever How did the situation become so desperate for Amur leopards What upset the balance for these powerful cats An Amur leopard’s paws and claws help it walk easily on snow and ice 9
