The move was the largest cheetah relocation ever attempted: sixteen cats carried roughly a thousand miles from South Africa to Panyame Conservancy in western Mozambique, a landscape where the species had disappeared [1]. When weather grounded the airlift, the drive took fifty-three hours [1].
A year on, a female named Kazi - the one who had the hardest time settling into the new range - gave birth to three cubs, the first cheetahs born to the reintroduced population [1]. Fourteen of the original sixteen survived their first year, a survival rate near eighty-seven percent, far above what unfenced reintroductions usually see [1].
Fewer than 7,100 cheetahs remain in the world, which makes three cubs in a place the cats had vanished from a genuinely large thing [1]. The reintroduction, on the evidence of Kazi's litter, is taking hold [1].
