It only took three years of bargaining and bureaucracy, form-filling and false starts — not to mention the added complication of a last-minute global pandemic — but late last year park rangers at Mozambique’s Gongorosa National Park were finally able to release a 3½-year-old female leopard from South Africa back into the wild.
The leopard is believed to be just the second wild leopard in the entire park, which encompasses 4,000 square kms (1,500 sq mi) of acacia grasslands and montane forests at the southern end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley.
Park rangers identified a lone male leopard in the park in late 2018.
It’s entirely possible there are more leopards in Gongorosa, but conservationists have learned the hard way to underestimate rather than overestimate wildlife populations. The park, gazetted in 1960 after serving as a hunting reserve from 1920-1959, once supported one of the most dense wildlife populations on the entire continent, but as many as 95% of the park’s animals were wiped out during Mozambique’s protracted, bitter civil war between 1981-1994.
The post-war recovery period, backed in part by the African Development Bank with help from the European Union and International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), took longer than expected, as is often the case with former war zones.
It sounds like a tiny step, but it could in fact mark a giant leap. The leopard release was organized in part by American entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Gregory Carr, founder of the Carr Foundation and president of the Gongorasa Restoration Project. Carr has formed a partnership with the Mozambique government to restore Gongorosa to its former glory, and has pledged USD $40 million over 30 years to promote the park as a source of tourist income for local communities.
The Covid-19 pandemic is doing the tourism industry no favours, of course, but in keeping with the philosophy of Lao-Tzu — whose words are still there to remind us after first being translated in the 4th century BC — the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.