This is a just a quick post and I'll have more about the origins of this fantastic image, seemingly of a melanistic leopard caught on a camera trap in eastern Nepal a couple of years ago. Geneticist Prajwol Manandhar sent me the image while we were having a fascinating online discussion last night. Prajwol is a passionate leopard researcher among his other intellectual traits, one of the up and coming conservation scientists here in Nepal, a group of people who give great hope.
There is hope for big cats. Leopards in particular are highly adaptable and like all big cats, highly evolved. Maybe the leopard will change its spots, maybe there will be more black leopards evolving out of necessity. Nature has many tricks up its sleeve.
But we must play our part. The leopard is a crucial ecosystem engineer and it will live where it needs to live to survive. One of the things I love about wildlife is there are no borders, no boundaries in their minds. In a world where humans are choosing to be divisive rather than uniting, to me, wildlife shows the way.
Wildlife are true global citizens, no passports, just nature. We must support that, for the sake of us all...
