Cats generally have fairly large families, i.e. two to four cubs are produced. But when it comes to leopards, particularly Persian leopards, they are down at the bottom. Decades of breeding records made by rangers and hunters throughout Iran as well as other West Asian countries suggest that a leopard mother normally has just one or two cubs, making leopard families the smallest in the cat family.

Nonetheless, we recently discovered a new family which was surprisingly larger than usual: a family of three cubs with their mom, or better to say a super-mom, in Tandoureh National Park. During the summer they spent nearly all their time around a single spring at higher elevations, with the family coming to drink on a daily basis. However, after that we lost track of even such a large family until mid-January 2018, when a group of visitors luckily encountered them just after they had consumed a four-year-old ibex.

This certainly came as a major relief after two years of intensive efforts to enhance anti-poaching and community outreach programs in Tandoureh. Fingers crossed for the super-mom and her cubs to make it through the rest of the winter!