Snow Leopard- A Beautiful Leopard

Snow Leopard

The Snow Leopards are  exceptional, wonderful gray leopards live in the mountains of Central Asia. They are protected by thick hair, and their wide, fur-covered feet act as healthy snowshoes. Snow leopards have strong legs and are remarkable leapers, capable to jump as far as 50 feet (15 meters). They use their long tails for balance and as blankets to cover very sensitive body parts towards the severe mountain chill.

Snow leopards prey upon the blue sheep (bharal) of Tibet and the Himalaya, along with the mountain ibex found over the majority of the rest of their range.

Though these strong predators can kill animals three times their weight, they also eat smaller fare, such as marmots, hares, and game birds.

One Indian snow leopard, secured and observed in a national park, is reported to have consumed five blue sheep, nine Tibetan woolly hares, twenty-five marmots, five domestic goats, one domestic sheep, and fifteen birds in a single year.

As these numbers indicate, snow leopards sometimes have a taste for domestic animals, which has led to killings of the big cats by herders.

These endangered cats appear to be in dramatic decline because of such killings, and due to poaching driven by illegal trades in pelts and in body parts used for traditional Chinese medicine. Vanishing habitat and the decline of the cats' large mammal prey are also contributing factors.

Clouded Leopard- A Medium-sized Cat

Clouded Leopard

The clouded leopard is named after the unique 'clouds' on its coat - ellipses moderately surrounded in black, with the inside a darker colour than the background colour of the pelt. The base of the fur is a pale yellow to rich brown, creating the darker cloud-like markings look even more unique.

The limbs and underbelly are noticeable with large black ovals, and the back of its neck is noticeably marked with two thick black bars.The clouded leopard is a medium-sized cat, 60 to 110 cm long and weighing among 11 and 20kg.

It does, even so, have an extremely long tail for balancing, which can be as long as the body itself, thick with black ring markings. The clouded leopard has a stocky build and, proportionately, the longest canine teeth of any living feline.Well tailored to forest life, the clouded leopard also has comparatively short legs and broad paws which make it outstanding at climbing trees and sneaking through thick forest. It can climb while clinging upside-down under branches and descend tree trunks head-first.

Clouded Leopard lives in which area?

 The clouded leopard is identified all over Southeast Asia and the Himalayas in the subsequent countries: southern China, Bhutan, Nepal, northeast India, Burma,

Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, and Bangladesh. It is considered to be vanished in Taiwan.

Clouded Leopard Ecology and Habitat

All over its range, the clouded leopard usually spends the majority of the time in the warm evergreen rainforests but can also be found in dry warm forests and mangrove swamps. It has been found at comparatively high altitudes in the Himalayas.

Threats of Clouded Leopard

The clouded leopard is commonly hunted for its teeth and decorative pelt, and for bones for the traditional Asian medicinal trade

.

Clouded leopard pelts have been revealed on sale in markets in China, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal and Thailand. They have also been presented on the menu of restaurants in Thailand and China which cater to rich Asian tourists.

Amur Leopard- Most Critical Endangered Leopard

Amur Leopard

 The Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) is regarded to be one of the most seriously endangered big cats in the world, with only 35 leftover in the wild, all in the Russian Far East. It is among ten living subspecies of leopard,  but it is particularly exceptional due to a specifically pale coat compared to most other subspecies, and dark rosettes which are large and widely spaced with thick, unbroken rings. This wonderful leopard is well designed to living in the harsh, cold climates of its range, with a thick coat that can improve as long as 7 cm in winter.

Size of Amur Leopard

 The female weight is 43 kg ( highest) and the male weight is 48 kg (highest).

Biology of Amur Leopard

 The variety of the Amur leopard formerly fitted the Amur River basin and the mountains of northeastern China and the Korean peninsula.

Today, it endures only in one isolated population in the Russian Far East, while there may be a few individuals in the Jilin Province of northeast China.

Threats of Amur Leopard

 The Amur leopard has been consistently hunted out of most of its previous range for its coat and for the bones

that are applied in Conventional Chinese Medicine. The local ungulates that make up the greater part of this leopard’s prey have also been significantly exhausted, leading the leopards to focus on domestic livestock, such as farmed deer, and therefore inciting further persecution.

The tiny population that endures today is under extreme risk of annihilation; genetic variation is low in small populations and they are incredibly insecure to any chance event such as an outbreak or large wild fire.

Amur Leopard Conservation

  The leopard is secured but a proactive conservation attempt is required instantly if one of the most amazing of the big cats is to be rescued from annihilation. Attempts to save the Amur tiger  in the same area are displaying symptoms of success but the leopard has been mostly neglected till now .

African Leopard- A Good Hunter in Tree

African Leopard

The African Leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) is a leopard subspecies transpiring throughout most of sub-Saharian Africa. They are becoming progressively rare outside secured places. The trend of the population is reducing. So for this reason, the IUCN identified leopards as Near Threatened.

Geographical Deviation and Characteristics of African Leopard

African leopards present great variance in coat color, based on place and environment. Coat color differs from pale yellow to deeply gold or tawny, and often black, and is designed with black rosettes while the head, lower limbs and belly are identified with solid black. Male leopards are bigger, averaging 60 kg (130 lb) with 91 kg (201 lb) being the highest possible weight acquired by a male. Females weigh about 35 to 40 kg (77 to 88 lb) in average.

Behavior and Ecology of African Leopard

Leopards are usually most energetic between sunset and sunrise, and kill more prey  at the moment. They have a remarkable capability to adjust to changes in prey availableness, and have a very large diet.

Leopards often cache large kills in trees, a tendency for which great energy is needed. There have been various observations of leopards transporting carcasses of young giraffe, approximated to weigh up to 125 kg (276 lb), i.e. 2–3 times the weight of the leopard, up to 5.7 m (19 ft) into trees.Leopards are very stealthy and like to stalk close and run a comparatively short range after their prey. They kill via suffocation by snatching their prey by the throat and biting down with their strong jaws. They seldom fight other predators for their food.

Threats for African Leopard

All over Africa, the main threats to leopards are environment conversion and extreme persecution, particularly in retribution for real and identified livestock loss. In Tanzania, only males are permitted to be hunted, but females composed 28.6% of 77 trophies shot between 1995 and 1998. Eliminating an extremely high number of males may generate a cascade of deleterious results on the population. Though male leopards offer no parental care to cubs, the existence of the sire enables mothers to raise cubs with a lowered risk of infanticide by foreign males. There are few efficient observations of infanticide in leopards but new males coming into the population are prone to kill current cubs.

With improving proximity to settlements and concomitant human hunting pressure, leopards manipulate smaller prey and occur at significantly reduced population densities. In the presence of intensive bushmeat hunting encompassing human settlements, leopards appear completely omitted.