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The Namaqua Project is fully funded by Conservation International (CI) and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). Thank you for this amazing support!

The CLT Namaqualand project has been quite something! About as extreme as the weather in the area, it has been through lows and has come through it all and is now on the road to success. It all started with our most magnificent leopard photo to date – that of a beautiful female leopard (Rachel) and her two cubs captured on film earlier in the year.

“That’s my track!” yelled Roonie in utter excitement. Ten children, fine Cederberg sand, swept smooth with a broom and Liz leading each one blind-folded round and round and then making a print with their shoe they would later need to identify. “This is an exercise in observation which is one of the focuses of this project” says Elizabeth Bond leader of the Cape Leopard Trust Children’s Education Project. “Each child successfully recognized their respective ‘spoor’ – something that would surely help them if they were lost and needed to find their way back…”

Join us at the Spring Charity Event on the 4th of October 2008 where the Western Cape Travel Industry is hosting a fund raiser where proceeds will go to three charities of their choice.

The Cape Leopard Trust have been chosen as one of these - Quinton and Elizabeth will be attending the event at the Cape Town Convention Centre and will also give a short talk.

History will be made, as this will be the first time Quinton has ever had to wear a suit.

Download the Event Information here.

We have finally begun to have some success in capturing the elusive and wily Cederberg female leopards. On Monday the 14th July, we managed to capture and collar our fourth adult female leopard – F5. We have named her Lizzy. Amazing as it seems, this is the second female to be collared in less than 1 month. On the 18th of June we managed to collar Spot (F10), adopted by Motamedia in the UK.

Lizzy, adopted by one our main sponsors, the Hans Hoheisen Charitable Trust, has eluded our traps for over a year now! She was first photographed on Bakkrans Nature Reserve in 2004, then had a cub, Ololo, whom we captured on film in January 2005. In March 2006, we again got photographs of her with two 3 month old cubs. Then she disappeared off the radar – for over a year. We got occasional tracks, suspecting it was her, but no confirmation.

Two members from communities in Namaqualand that are involved in the BIOTA group have been selected to receive training by the CLT project team.

John Yeld, Cape Argus

A Cape leopard cub that spent an agonising three-and-a-half days with a mangled paw tightly jammed in the steel teeth of a gin-trap on a Northern Cape farm, has been euthanased by conservationists after being released.

Members of the Cape Leopard Trust found that the injuries to its paw, which had been almost severed and the bones broken, were too severe for the six-month-old animal to have survived in the wild.

The mother leopard had stayed with the cub while it was in the trap, so close that the conservationists at first thought two animals had been trapped.

Ironically, the mother and her two cubs, one of them the trapped animal, had been "snapped" by a camera trap in the Namaqualand National Park just a few weeks ago. The last confirmed resident leopard in the area was in 1922.