‘Nature doesn’t wait’

In the Caucasus Mountains, rare Persian leopards know no borders

Story by Saxon Bosworth and Luka Tkemaladze. Edited by Eilish Hart.

Bookended by the Black and Caspian Seas and extending from Southern Russia to northern Turkey and Iran, the Caucasus region is home to Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (as well as three de facto breakaway states). In addition to being culturally diverse, it’s also one of just 36 global “hotspots” for biodiversity. Due to human activity, however, its rich ecosystems have long faced major threats. Conservation efforts in the region began in earnest after the Soviet Union’s collapse, but with new national borders came political and armed conflicts that continue to hamper research and preservation work to this day. For The Beet, researchers Saxon Bosworthand Luka Tkemaladzereport on the cross-border campaign to conserve the Caucasus ecoregion’s rarest species: the Persian leopard.

This article first appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.

“I once saw this species; it was incredible; it gave me so many emotions,” says Bezhan Lortkipanidze, a program officer at the NACRES conservation center in Georgia. In a rush to tell the story, he stumbles over his words: “We were shouting, crying. Me and two rangers, we saw this one!”Bezhan points to the large poster on the wall to his left, which depicts a very large, yet undeniably graceful, male leopard.

Bezhan saw this very leopard, whom the conservationists named Noe, back in 2008. Two rangers came to Bezhan after dark and asked if they could use his car to go after some poachers they had spotted in Vashlovani National Park. “We chased them around the national park. They recognized that someone was chasing them, switched off their lights and just disappeared,” Bezhan remembers. “It was already one o’clock in the morning, so we decided to go back. I was driving up [and over] a small hill and just as the lights dropped, I saw the leopard. It was so big!”

The leopard hardly seemed to notice the car, Bezhan recalls. It lingered for a moment and then “jumped over some high bushes and disappeared.” “It was so quiet and then…” Bezhan breaks into frenzied shouts, reenacting their reaction on that night. “We saw the leopard, the one!”

Persian (or Caucasian) leopards have long roamed the Caucasus and parts of Western Asia. But as the human population has grown, so has the number of threats to this subspecies. Since the 18th century, these leopards have lost 84 percent of their historic range, and the exact number in existence today is unknown. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List estimated that there were 800–1,000 in the wild as of 2015. Local experts told The Beet that they themselves don’t have accurate figures; the leopard’s enigmatic lifestyle makes their numbers extremely difficult to discern.

Conservation efforts directly aimed at the Persian leopard population in the South Caucasus began under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 2000. Before that, such efforts were nonexistent, the WWF says. During the Soviet period, predators like the Persian leopard were systematically exterminated as pests and their numbers rapidly declined. Then, after the USSR’s collapse in 1991, independent Georgia suffered a serious economic crisis that impeded conservation work.

“In the 1990s, there was no conservation at all. It was a time of survival,” Bezhan recalls, explaining that researchers were often afraid to go into rural areas. “If you went to the fields, there were people with Kalashnikovs.”

According to WWF Caucasus, its leopard conservation program has yielded encouraging results, but the population remains “small and fragmented.” Hard evidence of individual leopards is normally recorded using camera traps, while in-person sightings are incredibly rare.

Bezhan suggests that his experience in 2008 is the only confirmed in-person sighting in modern Georgia. Researchers first discovered signs of Noe in Vashlovani National Park in 2003 and continued to observe him there until 2009. Then 12 years passed without any sign of leopards until one night in 2021, when a camera trap captured the undeniable figure of a leopard walking through the forests of the Tusheti National Park in northern Georgia.

‘No contact’

Andranik Gyonjyan was around 10 years old when he first traveled around the rural areas of his home country, Armenia. It was the early 1990s and his uncle — an architect tasked with assessing the country’s bridges — brought Andranik along as his assistant. Over the course of two trips, he saw many animals for the first time, ticking them off one by one in his 1989 edition of the Armenian SSR’s Red Book (an official list of rare and endangered species). Andranik cherishes this book — and those sightings — to this day. “I remember [it made] a very deep impression when I first saw a wild agama [a type of lizard]. It was something extraordinary for me,” he tells The Beet.

Andranik has spent the last 20 years researching large mammals, including the Persian leopard — but has yet to see one in the wild with his own eyes. His wife, wildlife researcher Tsovinar Hovhannisyan, shares his dream of seeing a Persian leopard in-person. “When people used to imagine [seeing] such a large cat in Armenia, it sounded like magic, like a fairytale,” she says.

According to Andranik, poor upkeep and connectivity of eco-corridors and protected areas, heavy agricultural land use, and insufficient eco-education are all obstacles to the Persian leopard’s survival. He and his colleagues are currently working to assess the large mammal populations in the region; this includes using camera traps to identify and monitor leopards crossing in from Iran.

Ongoing conflicts in the region also hinder conservation efforts. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which escalated into a six-week war in 2020, re-erupts intermittently. Researchers and conservationists continue their work nonetheless, but the conflict has drastically complicated regional cooperation, Tsovinar says.

“Before, it was somehow possible to exchange information and data with Azerbaijan,” she explains. “We were sending emails to Georgian partners, and they were forwarding it to colleagues [in] Azerbaijan and [vice versa]. No direct contact. But now [after the 2020 war], no contact.” “I hope we in wildlife conservation can one day see the technology and data used by the military,” she adds.

Back in Georgia, Bezhan reminisces about Nugzar Zazanashvili, the WWF Caucasus’s legendary conservation director who passed away in May 2021. Zazanashvili, Bezhan says, was able to bring all parties to the table in the name of conservation and is sorely missed.

“He was leading the leopard conservation in the Caucasus, and he had this feeling that we have to find it [here]. We have to find the leopard; it should be our [Georgia’s] species, as well,” he recalls. Bezhan remembers he was conducting a survey in 2020 when Zazanashvili called to say that it was the last time they would get funding to search for fresh evidence of the Persian leopard.

“It’s a pity he passed away before we got these results in 2021,” Bezhan laments. “When we discovered this new leopard in Tusheti [National Park], I had the feeling that Nugzar’s spirit was here.”

‘It’s like pulling bricks’

“Wildlife doesn’t recognize human borders. Where there are tensions between humans, nature thrives,” says Georgian zoologist Lexo Gavashelishvili. Outside of militarized areas, such as the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, the buffer zones that separate the countries of the Caucasus have become hotspots for certain species — including the Persian leopard.

“Most of the leopards that have been camera-trapped were near border areas: in the Southern Caucasus — Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan — [and] the northern part of Iran,” Lexo says. The leopard population in Iran has been expanding, he explains, so most of the big cats caught on camera in the Caucasus region are “castaways” — young or unhealthy male leopards pushed out by stronger, territorial males.

According to Lexo’s research, Persian leopards aren’t well suited to the snowy climate of the Greater Caucasus mountain range, which stretches across the width of the northern Caucasus, separating Georgia and Azerbaijan from Russia. The snow hinders the leopard’s mobility, he explains, and they are far better suited to the drier climates found in the easterly parts of the Caucasus Mountains and the arid landscapes to the south. Areas “between civilization and snow” are their ideal habitat, he stresses. However, as civilization grows, this precious space shrinks.

“Georgians, people of the Caucasus, we are proud of our folklore, [our] cultures, but most people don’t realize that this is in harmony with our local environment,” Lexo underscores. “If local ecosystems change, our culture will change too. [...] When we lose species, it’s like pulling bricks. Eventually it’s going to collapse into something different.”

Andranik desperately hopes that the Persian leopard won’t suffer the same fate as the Caspian tiger, which once inhabited the region’s forests and riverine corridors until it was declared extinct in 2003 after centuries of poaching and habitat loss. “Nature doesn’t wait for war to end,” he warns. “We should all come together, despite our differences.”

Indeed, information sharing and active collaboration between wildlife conservationists across the Caucasus region would improve the local leopard population’s chances at long-term survival. “We should be above these political problems, but, you know, humans are unpredictable. We don't know how it will go,” say Andranik and Tsovinar.

For now, the pair find hope in the story of a three-legged male leopard spotted in Armenia via camera trap earlier this year. The animal appears to be plump, thus eating well, with a healthy coat. For Andranik and Tsovinar, it’s a reminder of how adaptive the leopard can be in its fight for survival.

Bezhan is also optimistic. “I think the leopard can be like an ambassador to Caucasian countries, to bring them together,” he says. “This is our treasure.”

Story by Saxon Bosworth and Luka Tkemaladze for The Beet

Edited by Eilish Hart.