biodiversity hot spot,<\/a> has protected nearly 13 percent of its territory to help native species.<\/p>\nIn the southern province of Vayots Dzor, the government and environmental groups have linked a state-owned forest, a private nature reserve and a community-managed environmental area to create a 217-square-mile wildlife corridor for leopards and other threatened species including the Syrian brown bear, the Bezoar goat, and the mouflon, an endangered wild sheep.<\/p>\n
With its stocky, muscular build and large paws designed to traverse snowfields, the Caucasian leopard is the world\u2019s largest leopard subspecies. The total population is between 750 to 1,044 animals, living in four geographical areas across 11 countries.<\/p>\n
Nearly extinct after it was hunted for decades during the former Soviet Union\u2019s occupation of Armenia, a leopard was spotted in Armenia on a trail camera in 2005. Since then, the population has grown and experts believe as many as eight to 10 leopards might be living in Armenia.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe now have a sustainable population of reproducing leopards in the southern Caucasus,\u201d said Vasil Ananyan, project coordinator for the World Wild Fund for Nature Armenia.<\/p>\n
Near the country\u2019s southern border with Azerbaijan, residents began reporting leopard sightings around 2017, said Arus Nersisyan, director of the Arpa Environmental Foundation, a nonprofit organization that operates a 7,400-acre community reserve. The group set up trail cameras and was surprised by what they showed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe noticed that we didn\u2019t have only one leopard, but two or three,\u201d Ms. Nersisyan said in an interview.<\/p>\n
Samvel Karapetyan, a ranger for Arpa, recalled a night in 2019 when he encountered a leopard at the bottom of a narrow gorge near the historic village of Areni. Mr. Karapetyan had been tracking a leopard\u2019s pawprints and received a call that the animal had crossed a two-lane road.<\/p>\n
Mr. Karapetyan and a colleague saw the animal climb a rocky cliff face. He parked his vehicle, and began filming. He left the car door open in case they had to run, and slowly approached the animal with a mixture of fear and excitement.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was making noise to see what kind of reaction he would give,\u201d Mr. Karapetyan said. \u201cHe went behind the rocks. We stayed until the morning, but he never came out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three months later, a trail camera in the Arpa-protected area caught an image of the same leopard, identified by the distinct pattern of spots on its fur.<\/p>\n
It was Aren and he was limping with only three legs. He had learned to ambush instead of stalk his prey. The spot where he was located was not far from the border with Azerbaijan, a region strewn with land mines since the early 1990s conflict between the two countries. In Armenia, efforts to protect wildlife are complicated by a legacy of armed conflict.<\/p>\n
Aren was spotted again on a trail camera in 2022 in Vayots Dzor and then in 2025 in Georgia, but there hasn\u2019t been a sighting of him since, said World Wild Fund for Nature officials in Tbilisi.<\/p>\n
While hunting of leopards has been reduced in the past decade by the threat of million-dollar fines, poaching of prey species like the Bezoar goat is now the biggest threat to the leopard\u2019s survival, Hovhannes Martirosyan, head of Armenia\u2019s environmental agency, said in an interview.<\/p>\n
Other emerging threats to Armenia\u2019s wildlife include a growing commercial harvest of forest plants that feed native goats, sheep and bears; a rise in hydropower that is stressing waterways; and a warming climate that has disrupted the animals\u2019 food supply and migration patterns, according to Ruben Khachatryan, director of the Yerevan-based nonprofit Foundation for Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets.<\/p>\n
Still, it appears that Armenia\u2019s leopards are surviving. Wildlife officials announced recently that a new male leopard was spotted twice on trail cameras earlier this month in south central Armenia.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can hunt and find food,\u201d Boris Vanyan, a ranger at the privately-run Caucasus Wildlife Refuge, said about Armenia\u2019s leopards. \u201cIt only needs a protected space and to be left alone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, a leopard roamed the high mountain ridges and deep gorges in the sparsely-populated region of southern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[10745,851,842,184737,246,61,60,15179,82,284732,12684,284731,284730],"class_list":["post-672218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-armenia","tag-biodiversity","tag-conservation-of-resources","tag-endangered-and-extinct-species","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-leopards","tag-science","tag-u-n-biodiversity-summit","tag-united-nations","tag-united-nations-convention-on-biological-diversity","tag-wildlife-sanctuaries-and-nature-reserves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}