Have you watched the black panther movie starring our very own Lupita Ny’ong’o? A new discovery has been made making the movie more interesting to watch incase you haven’t.
Contrary to marjority popular beliefs that blank panthers are not a existing species, a British Wild photographer Will Burrard Lucas captured images of the wide melanistic leopard.The animal is loosely refered to as black panther.
The rare site close to the Laikipia wild camp is believed to be the first of its kind on African soil for the first time in over 100 years.
The experienced photographer got his lucky break at the Laikipia Wilderness Camp, a local wildlife haven run by Steve Carey.
“The biggest challenge in this project was knowing where to put my camera traps. When I heard that a black leopard had been seen up at Laikipia Wilderness Camp in Kenya my ears pricked up and I contacted the owners Steve and Annabelle Carey to find out more,” Will revealed in his blog post.
It took about four days before he finally got his big break and captured a wild black leopard, an accomplishment that hasn’t been equalled in possibly a century.
The findings from the Camtraptions remote cameras were recently published in the Journal of African Ecology.
Melanistic leopards are iconic creatures with a movie themed around the mythical animal interestingly based within the hypothetical land of ‘Wakanda’ in East Africa, the same region in which the actual black panther was spotted and captured on camera.
A Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) official, Paul Gathitu divulged to Kenyan reporters that KWS officers had also come across melanistic leopards in the Aberdare forest during a fencing exercise. However, he was yet to receive photographic evidence of the same.