Acinonyx jubatus
Drawn from open occurrence records inside Etosha National Park, aggregated onto a 25 km grid.
Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.
Records exist for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
The world's fastest land animal is also one of its most fragile success stories: fewer than 7,000 remain, and Namibia holds more of them than any other country, most living not in parks but on farmland, threading their lives between livestock and people. A cheetah is built like an arrow, 35 to 60 kilograms of spring-loaded spine, oversized heart and nostrils, and a tail that works as a rudder. The sprint everyone knows, zero to a hundred in about three seconds, is a bet it can only place a few times a day; the chase is won or lost in the first three hundred meters. Look for the black tear lines running muzzle to eye, the field mark that separates it instantly from a leopard.
Daytime hunter, using termite mounds and fallen trees as lookout posts. Males form small coalitions, often brothers; females raise cubs alone and lose many to larger predators.
Find them scanning from a mound in early morning light and wait: the sit-up, the stare, the stalk. Fast shutter, 1/2000 or better, and leave room in the frame for the run.
Never position a vehicle between a cheetah and its prey or its cubs. Every failed hunt you cause costs energy it cannot easily replace.