Reviving a Species

The North China Leopard was once heading for extinction, until conservation efforts brought its numbers up. But for how long?

By Wang Yan

The North China Leopard

A leopard takes a drink in Shanxi Province, 2016

Photo by cfp

In the spring of 2016, when Wei Shuanbing, a villager in northern China, was working on his family cornfield, an adult leopard jumped down from the slope of a nearby mountain, padded across the road, and ambled up the slope of the base of the next mountain. “A couple of other villagers were around, and we all saw the leopard at that exact moment,” recalled Wei to ChinaReport in mid-May. Heshun county is near Jinzhong City in China’s northern Shanxi Province, some 400 kilometres southwest of Beijing.

Wei and fellow villager Er Bao met another leopard a few days before, in the mountain forest. There had been no sightings of leopards by locals for the past two decades. The personal encounter of the big cat reminds Wei of his almost forgotten teenage memories, before the mid-1980s, when it was common for him to spot leopards in the surrounding mountains. “The leopards were not afraid of humans and they never ever attacked humans as far as I know,” Wei told our reporter during a recent telephone interview, “In most cases, they would walk away indifferently when I met them.”

Since the late 1980s, due to various reasons including deforestation, road construction, coal mining activities in the Taihang Mountain range in Shanxi, as well as poaching, the number of leopards fell sharply. Wei said that since 2000 he hadn’t seen any leopards until this year. Thanks to the country’s national Natural Forest Conservation Programme launched in 2000 and the confiscation of privatelyowned rifles from the late 1990s, the North China Leopard, a subspecies of the leopard family, very slowly clawed its way back. “There are no reliable statistics yet indicating how many leopards there are in Shanxi,” Song Dazhao of the Chinese Felid Conservation Alliance (CFCA), a domestic big cat conservation NGO, told ChinaReport in May.

“Locals in Heshun can generally live quite peacefully with wildlife, and they do not feel frightened if they see a leopard nearby,” Song said to the reporter, explaining that the area’s comparatively hospitable natural environment and sufficient prey also contributed to the revival of leopard numbers.