As is our custom at Future4Leopards Foundation, a leopard wall calendar has been published for distribution before the Persian new year, which falls on 20 March. The calendar has four pages for the different seasons showing large images of Persian leopards taken by our camera traps or photographer partners in our sites. It is also a great opportunity for the public to support us, as all costs of designing and publishing the wall calendar are met through our crowdfunding program. Thanks to donations from more than 50 individuals as well as four corporations, we have been able to produce 4,000 calendars, almost twice as many as last year.
The calendars will be distributed among thousands of rural households living alongside the leopards in the Project’s sites. Currently, our team is travelling around presenting wall calendars to nearly 2,000 families in the Kopet Dag region near Iran’s border with Turkmenistan, to some 500 families around the Bafq reserve in Yazd province, and to more than 600 in Mazandaran province in the north where we are also active. Our expectation is that a continued program of sharing information by providing useful and attractive materials like these calendars will increase people’s appreciation of the Persian leopard and the need to protect this marvellous cat and the landscapes it needs to survive.