The last time anyone confirmed a cheetah in Zambia's greater Luangwa ecosystem was 1998 [1].
This month six of them arrived - three males, three females, translocated from private reserves in South Africa into North Luangwa National Park [1].
They are not loose yet. The six are in a 2,000-hectare predator-proof enclosure for a soft release, which is how you give an animal time to learn a place before it has to survive in it [1].
Six more are due in August, and six more in August 2027. Eighteen cats, staged over two years [1].
The work behind it took about a decade - feasibility studies, prey-base recovery, habitat assessment - run by Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife with the Endangered Wildlife Trust. Olivia Sievert manages the Cheetah Metapopulation Project; Nakedi Maputla directs species and conservation planning at the African Wildlife Foundation [1].
Twenty-eight years is long enough that nobody working on this release watched a cheetah hunt in that valley as an adult. Now there are six.
