Forest officials claim to have caught 50 leopards in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor in the past eight months. Yet, the big cats continue to stalk people across the district and neighbouring Moradabad, leaving nearly 500 villages on edge. Officials said these leopards do not come from forests but are born in the vast sugarcane fields, earning them the local moniker “sugarcane leopards”. The affected villages lie in the belt where Moradabad and Bijnor meet the Uttarakhand border, a landscape of vast sugarcane fields and stretches along the Ramganga river that offers leopards ample cover. Two leopards caught in MoradabadIn Moradabad, thermal-imaging drones recently detected three leopards moving together in the area.