The leopard princess of Islamabad

In 2018, a wildlife patrol found a skull and claw at the top of Trail 6 in the Margallah Hills, just behind Faisal Mosque in Islamabad.

The rest of the animal’s body had either decomposed or been scavenged, but some of the skin on the claw remained intact. On closer inspection, it was found to have the rosette patterns of a leopard.

Analysis confirmed that the animal had been a fully grown adult and had died a natural death. Its skull was sent to the Pakistan Museum of Natural History, where it has been kept in a lab and away from public display ever since.

What was a shy, secretive and highly territorial leopard doing out here in its old age? No one could say for sure. Nevertheless, the discovery completely changed what we know about big cats in the capital.

British gazetteers say leopards were found in Swat, Dir and Murree and even the Kala Chitta range to Islamabad’s west, but they make no mention of sightings in the Margallahs. At most there are mentions of jackal, deer, monkey and boar (tigers became extinct decades ago).

It was only the Margallah locals who insisted there were ‘cheetay’ in the thick forests (the right word is guldaar tendwa). But in the absence of concrete evidence, myth more than fact prevailed.

It was more to the east of the Margallahs, up in the higher-altitude Murree Hills, especially near Ayubia, that people reported seeing them. As the Murree hills are higher up, they regularly get snow, so one theory was that the leopards would descend to the warmer Islamabad mountains as a winter retreat and go back to Murree when it was warmer. They sometimes came near human settlements, but never in the daytime.

But in 2005, staff in Islamabad’s Marghazar Zoo at the base of the hills were alerted to a massive disturbance on the grounds. They located the noise to a deer enclosure where a leopard was on a rampage. As the zoo had no leopards of its own, this one was a visitor. The cat was eventually subdued and captured, and lived out the rest of its life as one of the attractions until it died a natural death.

Its attack on the deers did, however, challenge perceptions because it took place in an unusual season and in broad daylight, when leopards were not usually known to hunt.

Over the next decade, hikers at the trails continued to report sightings and hearings. Capital Development Authority guards posted to villages such as Gokina and Kalinjar would tell hikers that they had heard roaring in the night. People from the adjoining villages also regularly claimed that their livestock had disappeared overnight (there are 20 villages inside the Margallah Hills National Park with a population of around 200,000).

As smartphones and online video sharing became common in the 2010s, some videos of leopards started making their way to cyberspace. On more than one hike during these years, when I was a teenager, I would inevitably hear someone in the group bring up the rumours that there was a predator in the hills whenever we heard a rustling.

The locals, of course, dealt with more than just rumours. In 2014, Zaheer Ahmed and a friend were shepherding his family’s goats in the hills of Shah Allah Ditta. The two men walked apart, talking loudly to each other. At one point, as they stood on two elevations with the goats in between, his friend screamed.

Zaheer looked down to see a shape moving between the trees towards the goats. He started banging his axe against a tree and screaming at the herd. As the goats skittered and bleated, the massive cat, unmistakable for its luminous eyes, stopped before slinking away.

Around the same time, Muhammad Nawaz, who lived in Talhar, saw a leopard make off with a calf on the village outskirts. Nawaz and friends watched in disbelief as the calf’s owner charged at the leopard with a stick and rescued his animal.

For Zaheer and Nawaz, this was only the beginning of their dealings with leopards.

The care of animals in the Margallah Hills National Park turned a page when a new organisation called Islamabad Wildlife Management Board was set up in 2015. Before this, the forest department managed the vegetation while the CDA, oddly enough, handled the wildlife and zoo. In two years, the board managed to recruit experts and wildlife guards to patrol the forest.

Among the first batch of new staff was Sakhawat Ali. As a child, he had never been allowed to keep a pet. His parents were not even partial to pigeons, which they saw as something only ruffians kept. He studied Zoology, Biology and Chemistry and was pleasantly surprised to find that his university was offering a Master’s degree in Wildlife Management. This time he got his way. His parents learnt that his thesis was an ornithological study of the birds on campus.

Sakhawat taught for a while after graduating, but his real break came in 2017 when the Islamabad Wildlife Management Board employed him as an Education Officer. By 2022, he was promoted to Director of Wildlife. This makes him one of the few people who lived through the entire leopard discovery saga.

He will tell the story with the slow body language of a teacher who peers at you over his rimless glasses if you interrupt. He will consult his records before making a definitive statement even though he doesn’t need to. When I asked if I could visit the leopard preservation zone, he drew me a guide map from memory on a pink post-it note.

Between 2017 and 2018, the wildlife guards, many of whom are from the villages, were itching to go out and find evidence of leopards after hearing reports from locals and tourists. However, the department did not have enough resources to sanction official leopard-finding missions when it had its hands full with people harming monkeys all day long.

So the guards decided they would do it on their own. Their morale went up when Sakhawat, then manager of operations, said he would help. For several months, he and the guards would wrap up their shifts and then go in groups to look for signs of leopards. The men were roughly scientific in their approach. They would figure out what areas the sightings had been reported from most frequently, and then work their way on foot one forest patch at a time to search for pugmarks (paw prints) and scats (droppings).

The first one to catch a sign of an active leopard in the area was Zaheer, the shepherd from 2014 who was now a wildlife guard. He saw scats containing fur and bones which he scooped up for analysis. The lab confirmed they belonged to a leopard and were recent.

Zaheer’s experience as a shepherd from Shah Allah Ditta, a village at the northwestern end of Islamabad, made him a natural tracker. He is lean and dark, and murmurs when he speaks. When I met him, I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes are the same shade of green as a leopard’s.

Zaheer is currently a caretaker at the Wildlife Rescue Centre in Islamabad, but he spent the bulk of his early career posted at Trail 6. He says he has heard the roar of a leopard multiple times, and one time they were so loud that hikers came running down back to the trail’s entrance. After pacifying the fleeing hikers by telling them........

© Dawn Prism