Shareholders and other visitors to Limpopo-Lipadi will know what a great place it is becoming for fantastic sightings of leopards. Some short-stay guests have averaged more than one a day and shareholders staying at the reserve for a month recently had a dozen sightings of thirteen animals! The regularity of encounters now makes it possible for us to begin an ambitious project to try and identify each individual leopard and learn more about it, such as where it holds territory. To help us achieve this are welcoming the active involvement of shareholders! Read on to find out more from Anton Kruger, who has suggested this project, about why we are doing this and how you can get involved.

So why would we want to identify individual leopards? Well, there are a few reasons, which can be categorized as statistical or emotional.

Statistical reasons include being able to make more accurate population estimates and understand where territories lie. Game counts generally don't generate useful information for species like leopard as they are relatively unlikely to be seen so calculations are better made from other sources of data (such as sightings). Identifying specific animals will also allow us to monitor any changes in the individual leopards on the reserve (which has importance for meta-populations) and understand why they are taking place (for example an old male not being able to control his whole territory anymore). Better estimates of leopard numbers will impact on calculations for general game species and prey needs for our total predator population.

Emotional reasons relate to our personal connection with Limpopo-Lipadi and the wildlife there. We as shareholders will get to know individual leopards, their personalities, and where best to look for them. We will be able to “grow old” with individuals, for example Sam, the youngster first seen at Mogorosi more than a year ago, and who is very relaxed with vehicles. Leopard sightings will become more than just “a sighting”, they will become a “visit with an old friend” or “making a new friend” and the accumulation of all of this will result in high quality experiences for shareholders and visitors to our reserve.

Work like this has been done very successfully on other game reserves across Southern Africa and notably is running to the east of us as part of the Northern Tuli Predator Project. Advice received from their researchers suggests that a simple photographic identification project is certainly an achievable and worthwhile start that could have significant benefits for predator research in the future.

So how can you get involved? What we most need from all the shareholders and their guests are photos. These can be used to compare with each other to pick out identifying characteristics, especially spot patterns around the nose and face or other distinctive places (eg "collars"). An example of one set of identification images is shown below.

Using shareholder submitted images along with shots captured by the trail cameras we think it will become possible to produce identification charts along these lines for many individuals. These can be made available for download and also placed in the game drive vehicles at the reserve to provide an extra layer to the experiences you will have with leopards at Limpopo-Lipadi.

However your involvement does not have to end there. As photos are received we want to build up a collaborative effort to do this reviewing and pick out the characteristics, debate the more difficult identifications and suggest names for the individuals we isolate. Shareholders can become part of this and opt-in to receiving emails with new images and join in the discussions about them through an online system we have set up. Shareholders can find out more about how to submit images and get involved by logging in to the website and picking the Leopard Project page in the shareholder area of the site.

Your help will be appreciated and we hope that you are also looking forward to getting to know our leopards better!