Critically Endangered · ▲ increasing
Amur leopard
Panthera pardus orientalis
individuals, Russia + NE China combined · as of 2024
confidence: moderate
What the number means
Cross-border animals may be double counted, which is why the combined figure is a range and not a sum. In 2007 the count was around 30 animals. Camera-trap monitoring in Russia's Land of the Leopard National Park now records well over 100 individuals, with roughly 40 more in China's Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park.
Range
A strictly protected border zone in Russia's Primorsky Krai and adjacent Jilin and Heilongjiang in NE China.
The rosette
the widest-spaced rosettes of any leopard, with the thickest black rings. Set on a long pale winter coat. Rosette patterns identify individuals like fingerprints.
Sources for this figure
- Land of the Leopard National Park · retrieved 2026-08-19
- WWF — Amur leopard · retrieved 2026-08-19
- ALTA — Amur Leopard and Tiger Alliance · retrieved 2026-08-19
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Rare facts
The things people don't know.
Rare fact
Rosette patterns identify individual Amur leopards as reliably as fingerprints. Every one of these ~130 animals has a known face and, in many cases, a name and a photograph.
Source Land of the Leopard National Park, Primorsky Krai
Rare fact
The rarest big cat in the world — and the one good news story of the four. The count has risen from roughly 30 animals in 2007.
Source WWF — World Wide Fund for Nature
The count, as animals
One mark per living animal.
Where you can see one
Honestly: almost certainly nowhere.
There are roughly 130 of them, across a forest the size of a small country, in a strictly protected border zone. The park is monitored by several hundred camera traps, not by tourists. Refusing to invent a tourism product here is the most credible thing this site can do.
| Place | Season | Odds | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Land of the Leopard National Park Primorsky Krai, Russia | Visitor infrastructure only | Not viewable in the wild | There is no jeep circuit and no sightings board. The park is monitored by several hundred camera traps, not by tourists. The Leopard Cave eco-trail and the park's rehabilitation enclosures are the only realistic way to see the animal in its native range. Access rules change — check with the park directly. |
| Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park Jilin / Heilongjiang, China | Growing visitor programme | Not viewable in the wild | The Chinese side of the same population, with a growing visitor programme. Same honest caveat: this is a monitoring landscape, not a safari destination. |
| EAZA conservation breeding programme Multiple collections, Europe | Year-round | Viewable | The global captive population is genuinely part of the species' survival plan, not a sideshow. Tallinn Zoo has been central to it for decades; several UK and European collections participate. This is the one case where a zoo visit is a conservation act. |
Keep going
Ask anything about the Amur leopard.
Including the obscure questions. Every answer is quoted from a sourced passage, and the assistant will tell you plainly when it does not have one.