Monitoring & recording local leopards

Behavioural studies that focus on the differences between individual leopards rely on the recognition of individuals and the ability to follow them through time. Variation in natural markings has been valuable to field biologists and others for the identification of individual animals. Knowing where to look and how to identify an animal is very helpful as it allows us to monitor the movement of individuals within a population and better understand the behaviour of that animal. It also helps to understand the life history of an animal and to determine other ecological data such as abundance, range or territory, and the structure of populations which are the essential elements for the study, conservation, and protection of a species.

After an insightful time spent learning from safari guides in South Africa, Radheesh returned to Sri Lanka and began searching through thousands of leopard images in our internal records and sorting them into individuals, with the vision of sharing the data in the public domain. The team of guides at Leopard Trails were trained to identify individuals and soon they all started contributing images to a meticulously managed database.

Leopard Trails will continue to document the behaviour of leopards using photography and videography to expand this publicly available database showing territorial, mating and feeding behaviour as well as the family lineages of the leopards of Yala and Wilpattu (our other camp). This is made possible due to the passionate efforts of our team who manage the website and also due to all the contributing photographers that we liaise with to expand the database. We encourage those in both tourism and wildlife conservation to use this database and engage with us.