How a leopard hauls its own weight into a tree, and why
The hoist is the leopard's signature move. A study in Sabi Sand measured how often they do it, what it costs, and what it saves them.
Of all the things a leopard does, the one people remember is the hoist: a cat of 60 kilograms climbing a vertical trunk with an impala of similar weight clamped in its jaws, then wedging the carcass into a fork five metres up and settling down to feed. It looks like showing off. It is accounting.
The problem the tree solves
Leopards are solitary and, by big-cat standards, small. A single leopard cannot defend a kill against a clan of hyenas or a pride of lions, and both are expert at following the sounds and the vultures to someone else's meal. For a cat that might kill only every few days, losing a carcass is expensive.
A team from Panthera, the wild-cat conservation group, studied the leopards of South Africa's Sabi Sand reserve to put numbers on it. They found that leopards lost around a fifth of their kills to other carnivores, with hyenas responsible for about half of the thefts and other leopards for most of the rest. Hoisting changed the odds: a kill cached in a tree was far less likely to be stolen, and leopards hoisted just over half of all the kills the researchers recorded, choosing to do so most often with prey that was large enough to be worth it but not so large that they could not lift it. The carcasses hoisted ranged from about 40 to 140 per cent of the leopard's own body mass.
The strength
How does a cat lift more than its own weight up a tree? Leopards are built for it: proportionally the strongest climbers among the big cats, with a heavy neck and shoulders, short powerful legs, retractable claws that work as crampons and a long tail for balance. They do not carry the carcass in their mouth so much as drag it, gripping with the jaws and pushing with the hind legs, often in a series of lunges with rests on the way. Even so, the effort is enormous, which is why they do not bother with small prey and sometimes give up on the biggest.
Males, females and the view from the tree
The study found that males hoisted more often than females. Part of the reason is that a visible carcass in a tree advertises the kill to other leopards, including larger males who will take it from a female, so females sometimes do better to eat fast on the ground and leave. The tree is not a perfect safe. Lions occasionally climb for a kill, and hyenas will stand beneath a tree for hours waiting for a dropped leg.
Where to see it
Sabi Sand and the Greater Kruger reserves, South Luangwa in Zambia, and the Seronera area of the Serengeti are the places where guides find leopards in trees most reliably. Look for a tail hanging below a horizontal branch, or a cloud of flies around a fork.
Checked October 2026. Entry rules, fees and seasons change; confirm with official sources before you book.
