Leopard Research - Conservation Camera Traps

Our camera traps which have been purchased due to donations have been making such a great impact. The volunteers tagged 9554 pictures during the month of October, 11 of these pictures were leopards! 41 were other large predators and 429 were of civet, genet, honey badger and white tailed mongoose. From this 12 leopard ID kits were updated and created by volunteers.

Even better news, since the start of 2015 we have been able to identify 41 different leopards!

Moving beyond the camera traps, we continuously look out for the leopards and surrounding animals. Our volunteers participated in a snare sweep to do just this. Snares are a very common form of poaching because of how cheap and easy they are for the poachers to use. They consist of a loop of wire which pulls tighter around an animal the more it tries to escape. Our volunteers managed to work with an anti-poaching unit to remove 23 snare from a nearby reserve! Not only will those snares not be able to capture any animals now, but hopefully it will deter the poachers from using that area again as well!

We wanted to send a big thank you to those who have donated to our projects! This project is making a huge impact and as the Kruger team explains: “Our Camera traps play a very large role in our leopard studies. It is very exciting when our camera traps get a clear photo of a leopard that makes it easy to identify the individual, and even more exciting when a camera trap captures a clear photo of both sides of a leopard which is what happened with this beautiful young female.”