Wild life | 7 March 2019

Laikipia

  A female black panther was recently photographed at our neighbours’ place. Exactly like Kipling’s Bagheera, she was ‘inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk’. The images show her to be the most beautiful of creatures. A black panther is a melanistic leopard. I rarely see leopards and I have never seen this individual but for years a local Laikipia researcher called Ambrose Letoluai had heard about these black panthers from elders in our area. Based at Loisaba Conservancy next to us, Ambrose works for a San Diego Zoo leopard project. As part of his routine to record cat habits he installs devices called camera traps in rocky outcrops and trees. Leopards are elusive, but I was surprised to learn Calvin Klein perfume (‘between love and madness lies Obsession’) dabbed around the cameras was a sure-fire way to attract them within photographic range at night. For months last year, the San Diego team gathered material on this black panther. Then in January a rather good British photographer set up a camera trap in the same triangle of bush. The images he captured of the creature delighted the world, reaching an audience of 330 million. ‘Unreal,’ tweeted Lupita Nyong’o, a Kenyan who starred in the movie Black Panther

. It seems obvious this should have been a godsend in Kenya’s efforts to conserve nature. It proves Laikipia is uniquely special, a home to extraordinary, rare creatures in a shrinking, last wilderness worth protecting. The appearance of the black panther symbolises a reward to all the poor herdsmen who lose livestock to big cats but tolerate them anyway as well as to the landowners, scientists, government bureaucrats — and the tourists who fly across the world to see the wonders of Kenya.