AFTER LIONS and tigers, leopards are the biggest of the big cats. I regularly receive reports of black big cats the size of a large Labrador, plus a long tail, which is about leopard- sized.
Leopards have one of the most extensive geographical distributions of any wild mammal, being found across Africa and Asia including the Middle East and all the way to Indonesia. They are “generalists” – very adaptable indeed, thriving in a variety of environments including arid hills, rainforests and jungles, even towns, and their habitats include much colder places than the British Isles.
This suggests leopards would have no trouble adapting to life in the British Isles. In some regions of some countries – India and Indonesia, for example, much of the leopard’s diet is muntjac deer (or their close relatives). Muntjac deer are now found in abundance in East Anglia.
The vast majority of big cat sightings in Suffolk – and in Britain – see to be of melanistic leopards – at least two thirds of any “county sample” of big cats seen in a given area are black leopards.
Leopards (Panthera pardus) frequently carry their prey up trees to eat in peace or to stash their to come back and eats bits of it later, so any remains of deer up a tree found in Suffolk are likely to have been put there by a leopard. They are generally solitary and warn each other of their presence with a “sawing” roar, rasping sounds or a noise like a cough.
Leopards also leave scent-marks to mark their territory and also leave scratch marks on trees.
For some unknown reason, nearly all the leopards reported seen in the wild in the British Isles are melanistic – black leopards. I have heard of spotted leopards seen on the South Coast of England – around Dorset – and I have been shown the yellow and black hairs of a leopard left on barbed wire in the Purbeck Reedbeds round there.
I have also heard a report of a leopard seen in Essex, in the area around Epping Forest, that was spotted at the front and up to halfway up its body and black on the back half. The Beast of Brookland, a big cat seen in Essex around 2018, is described by witnesses as a spotted leopard.
Leopard wool from a spotted leopard, pulled off a barbed wire fence in the Purbeck Reed Beds, Dorset back in 2013, with thanks to Jonathan McGowan. Photo by the author.
Different populations of leopards around the world have a different frequencies of melanistic individuals occurring within them. Black leopards seem to be generally much rarer in Africa than in Asia, with the exception of the Abardare Highlands in Kenya, where black leopards are relatively common. Within Asia , some populations have many more black leopards than others – Malaysia and Indonesia are believed to have the highest proportion of melanistic leopards. (See below.)
At the time of writing you can see a black leopard in East Anglia. Lela the melanistic leopard lives at Hamerton Zoo in Cambridgeshire. Hamerton Zoo also has servals, tigers including white tigers, Canadian lynxes, oncillas and rusty spotted cats.
One witness who got a good look at a Suffolk big cat through a rifle sight (no, he didn’t shoot) was able to see that the animal, which was sunning itself, was shiny black with visible spots and rosettes in a slightly darker hue. This was likely a melanistic (black) leopard. Several reports I have received describe a very, very dark brown animal. While dark chocolate brown pumas do exist, this is more likely to be a melanistic leopard which is a near-black very dark shade of brown. Some black felids have a more rusty brown coat in the summer.
Melanistic leopards are sometimes informally known as “black panthers”. Technically, however, there is no such animal as a “panther”. Zoology recognises leopards and pumas. Leopards are sometimes called “panthers”, especially “black panthers”, while The Pink Panther from the films and cartoons was probably supposed to be a leopard. Confusingly, pumas are also referred to as “panthers”, especially the “Eastern panthers” of southern Florida and the officially locally extinct but still reported panthers of eastern seaboard of the USA and Canada.
Some not particularly well stuffed leopard specimens at the Tadas Ivanauskas Zoological Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania. There is a lot of variation in just how black melanistic leopards are – from pure jet black to dark brown with clearly visible darker rosettes. These specimens could date back to as early as the 1920s and the black colour in melanistic taxidermy specimens tend to fade over the years.
There are at least eight known sub-species of leopard. (Possibly more, depending on who you ask.) Any leopards living in the wild in Britain are likely to be a mix of several different sub-species and populations.
The African leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) has a range mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa but also some isolated populations in the north of the continent.
Within all leopard subspecies, including the African leopard, there are a lot of variations in local – now usually isolated – populations. African leopards in parts of the Congo DR, for example, are more massive and muscular, while Somali “micro-leopards” are among the smallest of all leopards, not that much bigger than some species of lynx or wildcat. The African leopards of the Cape Provinces at the southern tip of South Africa are also said to be smaller. The (spotted) leopards of Africa are generally bigger than Asian leopards.
Arabian leopards (Panthera pardus nmir) are critically endangered, with fewer than a hundred animals left in the wild. They are now thought to be restricted to arid, mountainous regions in Oman, Yemen and possibly Saudi Arabia.
Indian leopards (Panthera pardus fusca) are said to have larger rosettes than the other subspecies, with a paler coat in desert habitats, greyer coats in colder climes and more ochre in rainforest habitats. Some of them now live in towns, very close to humans.
The Persian leopard also known as the Anatolian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor also known as Panthera pardus tulliana) is found across Iran and Afghanistan, the Caucuses and (probably) Turkmenistan. It is regarded as one of the bigger subspecies of leopard in the world. It has relatively few spots and rounded ears. (Some sources list the Persian leopard and the Anatolian leopard as different sub-species, other sources lump them together.)
Indochinese leopards (Panthera pardus delacouri) are found in Southeast Asia – most of them are to be found on the Thai-Malaysian border and eastern Cambodia and also in southern China. They hunt mostly at night and have short fur and if they are spotted have short fur and almost rusty-red colouration. Spotted Indochinese leopards has small rosettes, often so close together that its fur looks dark.
Camera trap studies from 1996 to 2008 in southern Thailand and the Malaysian peninsula showed that north of the narrow Kra Isthmus in southern Thailand and Myanmar, Indochinese leopards are predominantly spotted, south of this isthmus they are nearly all black. It is thought that black colouration confers an advantage in ambushes in this environment. The mostly black leopard population south of the Kra Isthmus is threatened by hunting – there are now thought to be as few as 500 such leopards left in the wild.
There is also the Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas) now restricted to the western end of the Indonesian island of Java. It hunts in the day and has a greater population density than Indochinese leopards. It is smaller than mainland leopards with a darker coat and spots spaced closely together. It is estimated that around a third of Javan leopards are melanistic.
The Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) is currently now critically endangered, down to maybe 100 individuals in the wild in the Russian Far East and the Russian-Chinese border. They are now more numerous in zoos than in the wild. They are relatively small and have cream coloured fur that is more rusty red in the winter, when it is much thicker. They are quite diurnal (hunting in the day). Within East Anglia, Thrigby Hall wildlife park in Norfolk has a spotted Amur leopards – as does Colchester Zoo in Essex, which additionally has an Amur tiger, an African lion and a cheetah.
The Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) is a quite large sub-species with a rusty yellow colour with dark spots and close-set rosettes. Within East Anglia, Banham Zoo in Norfolk has a spotted Sri Lankan leopard – it also has a margay, an Amur tiger, a cheetah, a snow leopard and a Pallas cat.
There’s an identification chart comparing different subspecies of leopard here (scroll to p5.)
Leopards share with pumas the characteristic of having a long tail which in many cases bends down and then bends up again near the end. The end of the tail is blunt (usually with a black tip in the case of spotted leopards) and a little bushy. It is this downward and then upward pointing tail that distinguishes leopards and pumas from any possible huge feral domestic cats.
There are also occasional “mutant leopards” encountered – unusual and atypical leopards with unusual colouration including melanistic leopards, albinos, “blue”, grey, “strawberry”, white-footed and short-tailed leopards.
There are unconfirmed rumours that black leopards were cross-bred with black jaguars to “fix” the melanistic black gene by breeders in the 1970s. A few black big cats that have been reported to me are massive and muscular with short necks and massive, round heads in a way that could be accounted for if they have a bit of jaguar inheritance in them. For more on hybrids between leopards and jaguars and between leopards and other species of big cat see here.
Leopards have been recorded as living around 10-15 years in the wild. So if the black big cats reported in Suffolk are black leopards that were let loose in the mid-1970s, they would now be in theirs fourth of fight generation.
Clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), snow leopards (Panthera uncia) and leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis) – despite their English names – are not species of leopard and none of these animals are closely related to leopards. While some of these species are kept in captivity in the region, nothing answering the description of a snow leopard, clouded leopard or leopard cat has been reported in the wild in East Anglia.
Another taxidermy spotted leopard at Tadas Ivanauskas Zoological Museum, Lithuania.