Where was the black leopard photographed on a tea plantation?

In and around Manas National Park in Assam, India, on a working tea plantation bordering the reserve. Photographer Matan Sharon documented the leopard family there, with the story published by PetaPixel on 29 June 2026.

Why did the leopard choose a tea plantation instead of the forest?

The tall trees planted through the plantation to shade the tea bushes from the sun also give her cover and somewhere to climb if larger predators, including tigers deeper in the forest, come close. The structure and quiet of a tended plantation made it safe enough to raise cubs in.

Are black leopards a separate species from ordinary leopards?

No. Black leopards, also called black panthers, are a rare melanistic colour variant of the common leopard (the same variant also occurs in jaguars). They carry more pigment than usual, so their spots only become visible up close, in the right light.

How many black leopards live in Manas National Park?

According to photographer Matan Sharon's reporting, only six black leopards live in the entire reserve.

Where does Boteane's Rich & Bold Black Tea come from?

Rich & Bold is a black tea blend sourced from the Nandi Highlands, Nilgiri, Assam, and Yunnan Province, built for depth and structure over a slow six-minute steep.

Black Leopard Tea Plantation | Boteane Journal

Quick answer: Yes: a rare black leopard is raising her cubs inside a working tea plantation bordering Manas National Park in Assam, India, documented by photographer Matan Sharon in June 2026. The shade trees that protect the tea from the sun also protect her, and only six black leopards remain in the reserve.

There are six of her left in the whole reserve.

Manas National Park sits in the foothills of the Himalaya, in Assam, in the northeast corner of India. Dense forest, thick heat, light that barely makes it through the canopy. It's the kind of place photographers spend years trying to get near, and even then mostly fail. Matan Sharon spent his time there looking for something specific: a black leopard, one of only six in the entire park, raising a litter of cubs somewhere nobody had documented before.

He didn't find her in the forest. He found her on the tea.

The tea plantation, not the forest

Manas borders working tea plantations, and it turns out that's exactly where a mother black leopard would choose to raise her family, not despite the humans nearby, but partly because of them. The tall trees planted through the plantation to shade the tea bushes from the sun do double duty. They shelter the leaf. They also give a leopard somewhere to climb the moment anything larger and hungrier gets close, and deeper in that same forest, there are tigers.

"She is so intelligent. She chose the only safe place around to raise her cubs. She knows when to leave them and when to return. She is protected 360° and made sure they are too."
Matan Sharon

It's a strange, precise kind of logic, if you sit with it. The plantation isn't wild. It's rows and rows of cultivated bushes, workers moving through them at set hours, machinery, structure. And it's exactly that structure (the shade trees, the quiet, the rhythm of a place that's tended rather than left alone) that made it safe enough to raise a family in.

Same leopard, different light

Black leopards aren't a separate species. They're a rare melanistic variant of the ordinary leopard: same animal, same rosettes, just carrying so much pigment that the spots only show up close, in the right light. Rarer still: catching one in daylight, unbothered, moving at what Sharon called "a precise pace," aware of every risk around her, never rushed by it.

A black leopard resting among tea plantation rows in Assam, India, shaded by tall trees planted to protect the tea bushes

Photograph by Matan Sharon, Manas National Park. Read the full photo essay at PetaPixel, and discover our tea from the same region.

There's something in that pace worth sitting with over a cup of something dark and considered. Assam is one of the regions behind Rich & Bold: black tea built on depth and structure, the kind that asks for a slow six minutes, not a quick dunk and go. It's a small thing, tea and a leopard's territory overlapping on a map. But it's the kind of overlap that reminds you where the leaf actually comes from: not a shelf, not a tin, a specific plantation, in a specific forest, where a mother leopard decided the tea rows were the safest place she knew.

Sharon saw plenty else on that trip: golden langurs, Asian elephants, Indian rhinoceroses, a Bengal monitor moving low through the undergrowth. Manas is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for a reason. But it's the leopard that stays with you. Not because she's rare, though she is. Because she looked at a working tea garden and decided, correctly, that it was home.