Caroline

Caroline is surely our most relaxed and most regularly seen cat. She spends most of her time in the northern and eastern part of the reserve, around three waterholes and along the perennial Mkuze river. Her placid nature and proximity to the main lodge makes her an excellent study subject, as she sturdiously ignores vehicles and carries on doing whatever it is that leopards do.

She is approximately six years old and is quite small for her age. She has a slightly droopy left eyelid, caused in an altercation between her and her sister some years ago. The excellent road network coupled with the forgiving terrain in her home range makes finding her relatively easy (as far as finding leopards go).

Caroline is one of our research subjects and is currently fitted with a Vectronics Aerospace GPS/Remote download collar (http://www.vectronics-aerospace.com/).  This relatively lightweight (600g) collar gathers and records five daily GPS locations, together with the date and time.  Apart from the extremely important positional data, these collars also record her head's x-axis (left/right) and y-axis (up/down) movements as well as the average temperature readings over 5 minute intervals throughout the battery life of the collar.  This provides us with excellent activity data (more than 70 000 recordings up to February 2008) which we can cross-reference to temperature, rainfall, solar radiation or any other environmental conditions we have good quality data on.