Acinonyx jubatus
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Pilanesberg National Park, aggregated onto a 25 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.
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, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December, with the widest coverage in June, July and August. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 3 squares of 25 km carry records for Cheetah in and around Pilanesberg National Park, and the 1,191 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.
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.
Never position a vehicle between a cheetah and its prey or its cubs. Every failed hunt you cause costs energy it cannot easily replace.