“Our goal is to use our surplus cheetah for reintroduction into other parts of Africa,” he says. In 2017, van der Merwe and his team transplanted South African cheetahs to Malawi-a nation about 1,400 air miles from South Africa-where the feline had gone extinct in the 1980s. South Africa is one of the only countries whose cheetah numbers are rising. ( See more photos of the snowy cheetahs.) They placed two males and two females in Rogge Cloof, a 71-square-mile reserve in the Northern Cape Province, in 2018. In recent decades, conservationists like Van der Merwe-a self-described cheetah matchmaker-have translocated about 60 of the agile cats to various game reserves. In fact, before colonists wiped out 95 percent of the cheetah’s population by the 1960s, the cats roamed much of the continent, from 10,000-foot-elevation mountain ranges to coastal forests to deserts (such as the Kalahari) where temperatures fall below freezing at night. He says the new pictures show “these animals are a lot more adaptable than you think.” “We tend to put them into categories,” such as assuming cheetahs are unique to the East African savanna, says van der Merwe, whose translocation efforts are funded in part by the National Geographic Society. ( See stunning photos of cheetah in action.) With about 7,000 total left in the wild, the cheetah is considered vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Those reintroductions are key to a conservation strategy designed to protect the dwindling species while giving tourists a chance to see them. Van der Merwe’s team took what he believes was the first photo in snow in 2014 in Mount Camdeboo Game Reserve, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province.īoth instances show cheetahs reintroduced to private game reserves in parts of their native range. His resulting photographs, taken in August of a female nicknamed Mona by conservationists and two males, are likely the second-known records of African cheetahs in snow, says Vincent van der Merwe, who manages cheetah reintroduction for the South Africa-based nonprofit Endangered Wildlife Trust. Tune in to Nat Geo Wild’s Big Cat Week September 7-11 and learn more about how Nat Geo is working to save big cats.