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 li