The Formosan Clouded Leopard

The Taipei zoo in Mucha has long been home to just a single, solitary clouded leopard. Compared with the other animals there, it's extremely quiet and never jumps around or roars. That's because--it's stuffed.

Early this year, the zoo finally found six live clouded leopards as companions for its stuffed specimen, but they had to be imported.

Are there any indigenous clouded leopards left on Taiwan?

Twenty years ago, the late zoo director Ts'ai Ch'ing-chih said that the clouded leopard had vanished from the island.

In 1982 the biology department at Tunghai University conducted an island-wide wildlife survey. Most young people in the mountain villages said that they had never heard of any clouded leopards being sighted in the past thirty years, but some people reported them being caught and killed ten years ago, and two old-timers believed that they still existed and even pointed out where they could be seen.

A discovery by Chang Wan-fu, a researcher at Tunghai's environmental science center, confirms the supposition that the Formosan clouded leopard still exists. While conducting an investigation on Tawu Mountain near Taitung four years ago, he came upon a dead baby clouded leopard in a hunter's trap.

However, Dr. Lu Kuang-yang, a professor of biology at National Taiwan Normal University, points out that any species requires a minimum population to continue to propagate, so that even if a few individual animals are sighted, the species may still face extinction.

Besides a scarcity of research into the subject, another reason why ascertaining the animal's existence is so difficult is that the clouded leopard lives mainly in trees, leaves few tracks, and is highly elusive. Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, an American "cat" expert who is currently studying clouded leopards in Thailand, told us that even in areas where it is known to exist for certain, the animal sometimes cannot be found for several months at a time.

The clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa) is still found in many areas of India, Burma, south China, Thailand, and Indonesia. On Taiwan its home is (or was) the mountains of southern and eastern Taiwan around 1,000 meters above sea level.

Despite its name, most scientists hold that the clouded leopard is distinct from true leopards and represents a bridge between leopards, lions, and tigers and the domestic cat. It differs from big cats in being unable to roar and from small cats by its low level of grooming and its posture at rest.

Living in trees, the clouded leopard preys mainly on monkeys, squirrels, and birds and is an adept climber, able to run down tree trunks head-first and swing from a branch by a single hindpaw before dropping onto deer or wild boar, which are its main terrestrial prey.

The clouded leopard is active at twilight, resting in the treetops most of the time. Its habits are solitary. Mother leopards produce from two to four young at a birth. The cubs open their eyes after ten to twelve days and are quite active by five weeks, achieving independence by around nine months. The life span of a clouded leopard may reach seventeen years.

Clouded leopard skins are highly prized as ceremonial garments among aboriginal chieftains on Taiwan, and some people blame the aborigines for the leopard's decline. But many experts, including Dr. Rabinowitz, point out that the aborigines around the world have been living with Nature for thousands of years, yet it is only recently that the animals have begun to face extinction.

Many experts maintain that environmental changes, the exploitation of mountain areas, and increased hunting to sell the coats for profit are the major reasons for the clouded leopard's disappearance. Today the clouded leopard is facing extinction worldwide and has been listed as a protected animal by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

So does Taiwan, after all, have any clouded leopards to protect?

This March, at the invitation of the ROC Council of Agriculture, Dr. Rabinowitz went to Tawu Mountain to take a look. He said that Taiwan still has several places similar to areas in Thailand where the animals are found and that the Formosan clouded leopard may still exist.

That's enough to raise the hopes of those concerned about the clouded leopard. And now. . .?

[Picture Caption]

The clouded leopard in the Mucha zoo is an import. Where are the Formosa n ones?

(photo by Arthur Cheng)

The clouded leopard in the Mucha zoo is an import. Where are the Formosa n ones?