The Black Leopard: My Quest to Photograph One of Africa's Most Elusive Big Cats

By Will Burrard-Lucas

This inspiring book tells the story of a photographer's journey to find the mysterious black leopard.

There are few creatures as gorgeous and elusive as the black leopard. In Africa, these magnificent cats are so rare as to be the stuff of legend. Will Burrard-Lucas's love for leopards began during his childhood in Tanzania and propelled him into a career as a wildlife photographer. In his quest to create intimate portraits of animals, he developed innovative technology, including a remotely controlled camera buggy and a high quality camera trap system for photographing nocturnal creatures. Then, one day in 2018, he heard about sightings of a young African black leopard in Kenya and with the help of people from the local community, he succeeded in capturing a series of high-quality photographs of the elusive cat. In this compelling and visually stunning book, Burrard-Lucas tells his story of creativity, entrepreneurship, and passion for wild animals, alongside awe-inspiring images of lions, elephants, and the black leopard itself.

• STAR WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER: Will Burrard-Lucas's passion for nature and expertise in camera technology have earned him coverage from National Geographic, The New York Times, and the BBC—and over 1 million fans enjoy his breathtaking work online.
• NATURE'S HIDDEN WONDERS: Black leopards are individual animals in whom a gene mutation results in excess melanin and an elegant black coat. Most are found in Southeast Asia, where lush vegetation offers them camouflage. In the semiarid shrub lands of Africa, black leopards are extraordinarily rare. Burrard-Lucas's images—showing these beautiful creatures prowling their territory under cover of night—are vivid reminders of nature's hidden wonders.
• INCREDIBLE STORY: This is an adventure story that takes place in remote and wild corners of Africa. It reveals Burrard-Lucas's devotion, vision, and innovation that led to him capturing photos that are not only incredibly rare, but also breathtakingly beautiful.

Perfect for:

• Aspiring and professional photographers
• Photography buffs
• Nature and animal lovers
• Big cat enthusiasts
• Conservationists
• National Geographic readers
• Fans of memoir and adventure stories
• Travelers to Eastern and Southern Africa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Apr 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781797203584

Will Burrard-Lucas

Will Burrard-Lucas is a British wildlife photographer. He spent part of his childhood in Tanzania where he first developed a love of nature. He developed an interest in photography whilst at university and shortly thereafter, started focusing his lens on the natural world. He became a full-time photographer in 2010. Burrard-Lucas is an advocate for wildlife conservation and works with various conservation non-governmental organizations, including WWF, African Parks, the Tsavo Trust in Kenya, and the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme. He founded the website WildlifePhoto.com to provide nature photographers with online services, products, and educational resources, and in 2009, Burrard-Lucas created the BeetleCam, a remote-control camera buggy which enables photographers to take close-up photographs of wildlife. He later created a high-quality camera trap system for photographing rare and nocturnal animals, and is the founder of Camtraptions, a company specializing in products for remote and camera trap photography. His work has been featured by numerous international media outlets including The New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Washington Post, National Geographic, CNN and BBC. Since 2015, Burrard-Lucas has focused on a long-term project to reveal African wildlife at night creating and using new photography techniques. His resulting work has been recognized in several international photography awards including GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year (2016, 2017), Sony World Photography Awards (2017), Travel Photographer of the Year (2019) and Siena International Photo Awards (2019).

Book preview

alone.’

1. Eyes In the Night

Kenya, April 2019

The night is black. Clouds blot out the stars and the air is thick with the promise of rain. The monotonous drone of crickets is occasionally punctuated by the eerie alarm call of a rock hyrax.

I turn off my headlamp, plunging everything into total darkness. A move in the wrong direction and I would tumble down a sheer rock face into a jumble of boulders and knotted vegetation. I take a step forward and there is a muffled click and a flash of light as the motion sensor detects me and triggers my camera. I stand still for half a minute, letting the African night envelop me. I feel far removed from the rest of the world.

The camera shutter clicks again as it closes. I turn my light back on and circle round behind the camera trap to review the image. There’s a picture of me on the back of the camera, perfectly lit as if I were standing in a photographer’s studio. Now I just have to wait for the elusive creature to pass this spot, preferably on a clear night when the long exposure will reveal the stars in the sky.

I have a nagging feeling that this ultimate image might never materialize. In the early days of the project, I was capturing photographs of the animal almost every week, but that was during the dry season, when its movements were constrained by the availability of water. The first rain fell four weeks ago, heralding the onset of the wet season, and since then the animal has vanished. Perhaps it has moved territory for good? At least I am still capturing images of other creatures, such as the beautiful spotty leopard that passed by last night.

I close up the camera housing and turn to leave. As my headlamp flashes across a rock, there is a glimmer of reflected light. I peer into the darkness and two spots glow brightly back at me. Eyes! By the spacing of them, they could belong to a leopard. My pulse races with excitement. This might be the same spotty leopard that my camera caught yesterday.

The animal is probably forty metres (one hundred and thirty feet) away; too far for me to make out properly in the dim beam of my headlamp. I creep closer, hoping to get a proper look. I dare not glance down at my feet as I pick my way through the rocks; if I take the light off the cat for a second then it might be able to see me clearly.

The distance has now been halved to perhaps twenty metres (sixty-five feet). It doesn’t occur to me to feel any fear. As the animal holds my gaze, the sounds of the night fade, and I revel in this moment of connection with a wild predator.

I can still see only the creature’s eyes, and wish I had a more powerful flashlight with me.

I take one step closer and the cat starts to move. With a shock, I can suddenly make out the entire form of the animal. Its body reflects no light at all; it is just a black shape cut out from the scene in front of me.

The silhouette of the black leopard passes in front of the rocks. Its movement is the unmistakable feline slink of a cat that wishes not to be seen.

The creature melts away into the undergrowth and I am left all alone. I am breathless with elation as I continue to scan the bush, hoping to catch one last glimpse.

Later, as I make my way down from the rocks, I am overwhelmed with a sense of privilege and euphoria. It seems that the many strands of my life have all come together to bring me to this singular moment in time.

I cannot tell you how long that encounter with the black leopard lasted. For a while, in that remote corner of Kenya, it was as if time had stopped.

‘It seems that the many strands of my life have all come together to bring me to this singular moment in time.’

A black leopard on a drizzly night in Laikipia County, Kenya, July 2019.

‘Is there such a thing as a real-life black panther? Is it a distinct species, or is it perhaps a myth?’

2. What Is a Black Panther?

The black panther is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, be it as the emblem of a revolutionary political movement or as a mysterious character in books, comics, cartoons and superhero movies. But is there such a thing as a real-life black panther? Is it a distinct species, or is it perhaps a myth?

My first introduction to a black panther was the character Bagheera in Disney’s animated version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. From the first time I watched it, I revered no animal more than the black panther.

As I reached adulthood, the mystique of the black panther only grew for me. I heard rumours of them being seen in remote locations, but despite travelling the world and talking to numerous guides and conservationists, I never met anyone who had actually seen one in the wild with their own eyes.

Some animals are susceptible to melanism, a condition that results in a black colour variant of the creature. This black colouration is caused by an excess of the dark pigment, melanin. It is the opposite of albinism.

In some species melanism can be quite common; black house cats are examples of melanistic cats. In other species it is very rare, or even completely unheard of; I have never heard of a melanistic lion, for example (although several fake images of black lions exist on the internet).

In theory, a black panther is any large melanistic cat. In practice, however, among the species of big cat only leopards and jaguars have been observed in melanistic form. All black leopards are black panthers, and I use the two terms synonymously throughout this book.

In jaguars the gene causing melanism is dominant, so if a cub inherits the melanistic gene from either parent, it will be black. In leopards the gene is recessive, so a cub must inherit the gene from both parents to be black. A leopard that does not have the recessive gene can never have a black cub, even if it mates with a black leopard. Another nuance is that a pair of spotty jaguars (animals exhibiting the normal golden coat with black rosettes) can never have a black cub, but two spotty leopards, both with the recessive gene, have a twenty-five per cent chance of having a black cub. It is possible for both jaguars and leopards to have at least one spotty cub and one black cub in the same litter.

Even though melanistic leopards and jaguars may seem to be a single shade of black, they still exhibit the characteristic rosette patterns. The rosettes are known as ‘shadow spots’ and are only observable under certain lighting conditions, such as infrared light.

Jaguars are found in the Americas, while leopards are found in Africa and Asia. In lush tropical rainforests the black colouration of melanistic cats may be advantageous, helping them to blend into the shadows of the dense undergrowth as they sneak up on prey. It is therefore not surprising that melanistic leopards are more closely associated with the thick forests in places such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and India, rather than with the African savannah. A melanistic leopard cub in Africa is also less likely to survive until adulthood. The leopards’ mortal enemies, such as baboons, can easily spot a black youngster amongst the parched vegetation and sun-bleached grass. For these reasons, the gene for melanism seems to be much rarer in African leopards than Asian leopards.

It is estimated that approximately eleven per cent of all leopards are black, with the highest concentration found in Southeast Asia. Nobody knows how many black leopards exist in Africa, or where exactly the relevant gene might be prevalent. The thickly forested parts of Ethiopia and Kenya appear to be the two areas where most sightings have occurred. These sightings usually lack corroborative images, but a few have been accompanied by tantalizing snapshots depicting a large, jet-black creature by the side of the road or amongst the vegetation. Only one African black leopard occurrence had been scientifically documented: a single record from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia in 1909.

A black leopard emerges from the undergrowth in Kenya’s Laikipia County, April 2019.

That was until early 2019, when my path crossed with a team of scientists from the San Diego Zoo in California, USA. We had no knowledge of each other prior to meeting, and had independently followed rumours that led us to the same black leopard in Kenya’s Laikipia County.

But to tell the story of how I came to be face-to-face with a black leopard in the African night, it is necessary to travel back more than thirty years to one of my earliest memories, an encounter that ignited my lifelong fascination with the elusive leopard. . . .

Holding a snake while my sister looks on during a holiday in Kenya, February 1990.

3. Childhood

Tanzania, October 1988

I am five years old and on safari in the Serengeti in Tanzania. My family moved to Dar es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania, a little more than a year ago and this is our fourth safari. I am excited to be here in this iconic safari location. This is where I am happiest: in a vehicle with my family, searching for wildlife.

We’ve already seen so much: prides of lions basking by the roadside, a scrum of vultures squabbling over a wildebeest carcass, and several cheetahs. We even watched with bated breath as one cheetah stalked a diminutive Thompson’s gazelle. Quick as a flash, the cheetah exploded out of the cover of tall grass and closed in on the gazelle as it desperately jinked left and right. Within a few seconds the chase was over, as a swipe from the agile cat’s outstretched paw made contact with the antelope’s hind legs and it fell. I watched in fascination as the cheetah deftly clamped its jaws around the gazelle’s windpipe and suffocated it.

But there is still one animal in particular that I am desperate to find, a creature we have still never seen in the wild: a leopard. These big cats have assumed an almost mythical status in our family and we obsessively look for leopard tails hanging down from every sausage tree that we pass. These trees are shaped like giant stalks of broccoli, with thick, shady canopies and wide horizontal branches, perfect for a cat to lounge on. The trees have large sausage-shaped fruit that dangle down on long stems, and it is easy for an eager eye to mistake one for the drooping tail of a leopard.

‘No! Leopard!’ we gasp in unison as we turn the corner and get a clear view down the track. The cat is walking down the middle of the road away from us. Behind her trail a pair of spotty leopard cubs. She is clearly heading somewhere with