After 100 Years, Rare Black Leopard Caught on Camera in New Sightings

Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas has provided the most recent, and highest quality footage of confirmed sightings of the African black leopard in Kenya.

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“I couldn’t believe it and it took a few days before it sank in that I had achieved my dream,” he posted on his personal blog Monday. This footage was released within months of another sighting, the first confirmed observation since 1909, published in scientific records. 

Only last year, Nick Pilfold, a global conservation scientist at the San Diego Zoo, published his own research and images on the elusive animal in the African Journal of Ecology.

Having heard of Pilfold’s sighting at the Laikipia Wilderness Camp, Burrard-Lucas traveled to Kenya to confirm the stories often told by people in the community. “As a local, people have always been talking about the black leopard,” Ambrose Letolulai, a local leopard conservationist who worked with Pilfold’s team, said. 

Pilfold’s team first placed cameras to track the big cat throughout the bushlands of Loisaba Conservancy. Then, they placed more cameras near animal trails and water sources, and, within a few months, were “rewarded with multiple observations.” Alongside a normally colored leopard, the team spotted the juvenile melanistic cat. 

Melanism, the opposite of albinism, is a gene mutation that overproduces pigment. This is what affects the leopard’s coat, which appears pitch black during daylight, but maintains its rosette patterns as seen in infrared footage taken during the nighttime.

“Melanism occurs in about 11% of leopards globally, but most of these leopards live in South East Asia,” explains Pilfold. This explains the rarity of these sightings in Africa, as well as the fact that leopards are considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

Factors that threaten the animal’s population include hunting and depletion of habitat, although the full extent of this decline is still unknown.

Kenyan conservationist, Paula Kahumbu, hopes “that this rare find persuades the authorities that we must balance conservation with development to protect our spectacular and mysterious species.”

This necessity is made even more apparent by the coincidence of Pilfold and Burrard-Lucas’ teams working separately, yet potentially having captured images of the same leopard.