Panthera pardus
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 leopard is the cat you have driven past without knowing it. No one has counted them reliably at a global scale, precisely because disappearing is what they do best: a big rosetted cat that lives from the Cape to the Congo to the edge of Windhoek, hunting alone, mostly at night, and hauling anything up to its own body weight vertically into a tree so lions and hyenas dine below in frustration. Males in Namibia can reach 60 to 90 kilograms. Pound for pound it is the strongest climber of the big cats, and the most adaptable: river thickets, koppies, dry mountains, it asks only for cover and prey. Seeing one is less about luck than about learning to read shade.
Solitary and territorial, announced by a call like a saw through dry wood. Most active from dusk; daytime leopards are usually draped along a shaded branch.
Scan big trees along dry riverbeds, especially horizontal limbs, and check koppie shade lines. At night, keep to red-filtered light and let the guide manage the beam.
Do not crowd a leopard on a kill or with cubs; a leopard pushed off a cached kill may abandon it entirely.