Cape Town - We were being watched. The fresh tracks of a predator were clear to see on the damp hiking path.
Instinctively I looked up at the slopes of the mountain, hoping to meet the golden gaze of a Cape leopard.
I knew my chances were small. These leopards are infamously elusive, even more so than their bushveld cousins. Hunted for more than a century, the Cape leopard’s last stronghold is the Cederberg and adjacent Cape fold mountains.
And then there’s the terrain. Thousands of sandstone boulders give the shy predators every chance of hiding from humans. Like a supernatural spirit, a leopard here will seemingly shape-shift to merge seamlessly with its rocky environment. Yet there were signs of the phantom everywhere. The hiking path was decorated with imprints from its paws. We were trekking up the slopes of Sneeuberg, the highest peak in this mountain range at 2027 metres. The winter rains had soaked the sand, and there was no doubt that a leopard had been this way within the last few hours.
We were just 250 kilometres north-east of Cape Town. As we ascended the steep ridge to reach the top of Sneeuberg, we could see the N7 in the distance to the west. Surrounded by farms, towns and rural communities, these mountains are a reminder of the awesome wilderness that once spread across the full extent of the south-western Cape.
Early explorers noted the presence of elephant, buffalo, eland, springbok, black rhino and lion. Then farmers ploughed the earth, hunters loaded their rifles, and soon these animals were gone. Now it’s the leopard that holds out, roaming these mountains secretly.
We scrambled and climbed our way to the very top of Sneeuberg. From here we could see the whole mountain range that extends about 100km long and about 30km wide. To the west we saw Tafelberg’s impressive plateau, and next to it the Wolfberg Arch, a soaring bridge of rock seemingly carved out of solid stone by a divine sculptor. To our east the 30-metre high Maltese Cross did its best to compete for attention, but from high up it was just a tiny speck. To the north, far below us, we could spot the hiking hut where we’d spend the night.
Researchers from the Cape Leopard Trust know from more than a decade of study that this rugged terrain spreading across 3 000 square kilometres is home to just 35 to 40 leopards. It’s a low density, compared to more fertile savannah areas of Africa. The Cederberg is more arid than traditional leopard habitat on the continent, while extreme summer and winter temperatures make it a harsh environment for any animal to survive. The mountain fynbos habitat is low in nutrients, so can only support small, sparsely-populated prey like klipspringers and dassies, which makes up the primary diet of a leopard.
“The Cape leopard is half the weight of leopards in typical bushveld,” explained researcher Jeannie Hayward. “And their territories are much bigger. A male leopard in the Cederberg has an average home range of about 250 square kilometres.”
Leopards here were once heavily persecuted. Hunters shot them whenever they could, and farmers would set gin-traps which snapped around a leopard’s leg, either breaking it or causing a prolonged, agonizing death. When leopard researcher Quinton Martins started his study in 2003, about seven leopards were being killed in the Cederberg ever year. “At that rate it wouldn’t have been long before leopards were exterminated from these mountains,” said Hayward.
Martins set about raising funds for camera traps and radio-collars to track the leopards, to study their behaviour and to raise awareness for their conservation. After ten years and thousands of kilometres of hiking, Martins had built up a formidable database of research that showed just how rare these animals are, and how fragile their future could be.
Local land owners, farmers and provincial conservation agency CapeNature came together to set up the Cederberg Conservancy, which placed a voluntary ban on the killing of leopards in the area.
Soon the Cederberg became synonymous with the Cape leopard, and the tourism value of their presence boosted the area’s appeal to visitors, even if the predators continued to prove elusive and shy. “People here are definitely more conscious of conservation these days,” said Hayward. Martins’ research indicated that leopards are not just a tourism draw card. The main ecological substantiation for their conservation is their value as an umbrella species and indicator species of a balanced ecosystem.
Protecting the leopard also means protecting their prey and conserving their habitat. Furthermore, leopards have a regulating effect on smaller meso-predators like caracal and jackal. These are the usual suspects when a farmer loses a sheep or goat, and leopards play a critical role in keeping their numbers in check. “A leopard is the apex predator, and it will readily kill a caracal or jackal. If you remove the leopard, there is no natural way to control the populations of the other predators which kill livestock.”
And while leopards do occasionally kill and prey on livestock, Martins showed that less than three percent of leopard diet in the Cederberg consists of sheep and goats. “When natural prey is abundant, Cederberg leopards would much rather hunt and eat natural prey like klipspringer or dassie,” explained Hayward.
We walked back down Sneeuberg to our hiking hut at the base of the mountain. The sun dropped under the horizon, and because it was a clear winter’s night, I rolled out my sleeping bag under the Milky Way.
Cape leopards pose little threat to humans. Their small size and their extreme shyness of humans mean they would keep well away from most hikers. But I’m sure I heard a leopard growling in the distance, it’s rasping call echoing off the rocks.
These mountains have pulled at the hearts of people for a very long time. No wonder the Bushmen painted thousands of exquisite images on the sandstone boulders. Perhaps they wanted to pay due tribute to the spirit of the place. These days in the modern world, the Cederberg’s spirit seems thankfully undiminished, and there’s no better story of this than the book The Rainmaker, by Don Pinnock. This novel is about a young boy’s escape from Cape Town gangsters into these mountains, and his search for identity among the wilderness and animals, including a leopard whose soul is bonded to his.
“Black and white people know many things,” says Zimry, a ranger who’s mentoring the young boy. “They make guns and cars and aeroplanes. They make war also. But they don’t know how to speak to the earth. If you can’t talk to life, you can’t hear it either. Without that talk, the earth will kill us all in the end because we’ll injure it and make life impossible. Whites and blacks can’t hear the voices in the stars like we can.”
So much wildness has been lost already. But what remains seems inestimably precious. The Cederberg is a place where we can learn talk to life again, to learn the language of wild animals like the leopard.
* www.capenature.co.za , www.capeleopard.org.za. Ramsay is a photojournalist in protected areas of Africa. Partners include K-Way, Cape Union Mart and Ford Ranger. www.LoveWildAfrica.com
Cape Times