The worst fears of wildlife biologist Nikit Surve came true on Thursday after he began the identification process and ascertained the fact that the female leopard carcass found at Filmcity on Monday night was none other than the leopard whom he had named Pani, during the leopard monitoring project in 2015 at Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP).
According to sources in forest department it is suspected that she might even have a year old cub, however the claims remained unconfirmed.
As per Surve who has been carrying out leopard population estimation study along with SGNP forest department since 2015, Pani was special and close to his heart as she had provided him with a very rare image.
"One of the camera traps set in 2015 captured her while she was dragging a dog as she killed. The image was very important not only from natural history point of view but it was the first camera trap image to document how leopards in Mumbai ventured out of the forest to hunt dogs who were easy prey. It also helped us convey it during human-wildlife conflict mitigation awareness programmes as well as scientific conferences," he said adding that another unique image of her was when she was photographed holding a mouse kill in her mouth.
Pani whose official name was L28 used to frequent areas of SGNP as well as Aarey and was regularly captured in camera trap set up for study in 2015, 2017 as well as 2018. The feline died a cruel death becoming a victim of poaching and as per experts she must have struggled for atleast four to five days after her abdomen portion was stuck in a wire snare leading to her death close to a film set. While forest department found her 20 day old decomposed carcass they also found that her 11 nails were missing.
The entire process to ascertain her identity was a gruelling one as per Surve from Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)–India as the carcass was decomposed. "Leopard images are matched on basis of spots (rosette patterns) of different individuals and in this case it was extremely difficult as most of the skin was decomposed but fortunately there was only a small patch of skin for reference. We used that as a reference and matched it with the images of various leopards from our database and using one image we were able to pin point that the dead leopard was indeed Pani," stated Surve.
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