MPUMALANGA may be home to the first black leopard spotted in sub-Saharan Africa in 40 years. Mpumalanga Parks Board representative Gary Sutter said on Monday that two confirmed sitings of a rare black leopard had been reported in mountains in Lydenburg in January and again in May. “It’s an ordinary leopard, but it has a recessive gene that makes it come out completely black,” explained Sutter. “It’s known as melanistic form.” He said a professor in wildlife management at the University of Pretoria, Prof. Koos Bothma, was particularly excited by the siting, because as far as he knew, the last black leopard was sited on Mount Kenya in the 1960s. – African eye News Service