Seven Leopards Are Back on the West Coast. Two of Them Are Cubs.
Camera traps have identified at least seven leopards on South Africa's West Coast, including two cubs, after an absence of about 170 years. It is a foothold, not a secure population.
A natural walk home, not a reintroduction with a ribbon
Dr Bool Smuts of the Landmark Foundation told Voice of the Cape that colonial administrations paid landowners to clear predators, and that the last leopard on the West Coast was shot in the 1840s. Mountain populations hung on in the Cederberg. From about 2015 the foundation started recording signs that animals were walking back toward the coast. Regular presence was clear from 2021. In 2025 a camera inside West Coast National Park took the first confirmed photograph there in about 170 years. SANParks announced it that November.
Reporting on 1 October 2026 put a number on the wider landscape: at least seven leopards, including two cubs about six months old, between Cape Town and the Berg River. The collaboration includes the Landmark Leopard and Predator Project, SANParks, the University of the Western Cape, Saldanha Bay Municipality and private landowners. Smuts called it a natural recolonisation. Nobody opened a crate.
Seven animals are a foothold. They cross roads and farms. A sheep killed in the wrong week can end the tolerance that let them back in. SANParks has said it will add cameras. A population is not secure because a cub was photographed.
Key Facts
- Reporting: 1 October 2026
- At least 7 leopards identified, including 2 cubs about 6 months old
- First park camera confirmation: 2025, announced by SANParks that November
- Last historical killing on the coast: the 1840s, per Bool Smuts
- Signs of return since about 2015
- Sources: Voice of the Cape, 2oceansvibe, The South African
Why This Matters
Rewilding stories are usually a truck and a speech. This one is an animal that walked. That is rarer, and it is also more fragile, because the same farms that tolerated a photo may not tolerate a lamb.
What We Don't Know Yet
Seven identified animals is not a density estimate. We do not have a published survival rate for the cubs. The 1 October reporting is two weeks old, which is why this is a brief and not the open. A leopard on a camera is not a recovered West Coast.