For years, a leopard roamed the high mountain ridges and deep gorges in the sparsely-populated region of southern Armenia. The animal had lost part of its left leg on a land mine along the nearby border with Azerbaijan, so it hobbled a bit
As the population of Caucasian leopards has slowly grown in Armenia, this adult male, named Aren after the village where he was often seen, had to search for new territory without the presence of other males in order to find a mate, researchers said.
So last year, Aren traveled nearly 200 miles north into Georgia where his three-legged odyssey was captured on a trail camera. To conservationists in Armenia, Aren’s remarkable cross-border trek is a small sign of progress in protecting the endangered Caucasian leopard.
Threatened plants and animals have been the focus for the past two weeks in Armenia, where delegates from around the world have gathered for the United Nations Summit on Biodiversity. They want nations to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030.
Armenia, a country that is smaller than Maryland but considered a biodiversity hot spot, has protected nearly 13 percent of its territory to help native species.
In 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.
With its stocky, muscular build and large paws designed to traverse snowfields, the Caucasian leopard is the world’s largest leopard subspecies. The total population is between 750 to 1,044 animals, living in four geographical areas across 11 countries.
Nearly extinct after it was hunted for decades during the former Soviet Union’s 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.
“We now have a sustainable population of reproducing leopards in the southern Caucasus,” said Vasil Ananyan, project coordinator for the World Wild Fund for Nature Armenia.
Near the country’s 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.
“We noticed that we didn’t have only one leopard, but two or three,” Ms. Nersisyan said in an interview.
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’s pawprints and received a call that the animal had crossed a two-lane road.
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.
“I was making noise to see what kind of reaction he would give,” Mr. Karapetyan said. “He went behind the rocks. We stayed until the morning, but he never came out.”
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.
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.
Aren was spotted again on a trail camera in 2022 in Vayots Dzor and then in 2025 in Georgia, but there hasn’t been a sighting of him since, said World Wild Fund for Nature officials in Tbilisi.
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’s survival, Hovhannes Martirosyan, head of Armenia’s environmental agency, said in an interview.
Other emerging threats to Armenia’s 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’ food supply and migration patterns, according to Ruben Khachatryan, director of the Yerevan-based nonprofit Foundation for Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets.
Still, it appears that Armenia’s 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.
“It can hunt and find food,” Boris Vanyan, a ranger at the privately-run Caucasus Wildlife Refuge, said about Armenia’s leopards. “It only needs a protected space and to be left alone.”
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