The Asiatic cheetah
Once a hunting companion of kings, now the last of its line: the Asiatic cheetah survives in the wild only in Iran, and only a few dozen are thought to remain.
Animals of Persiaجانوران
A cheetah on the salt plains, a nightingale in a Shiraz garden, a tiger that survives only in a word. Ten animals of the Iranian world, followed from the ground they live on to the places they hold in Persian poetry, painting and memory.
All of Animals of Persia
The Persian leopard
The great cat that never left: the Persian leopard still hunts the mountains of Iran and the Caucasus, sometimes within sight of Tehran's apartment blocks.
The Caspian tiger
The tiger of Mazandaran vanished from Iran in the mid-twentieth century. It lives on in a name, a hero's cloak and a genetic surprise.
The Asiatic lion and the Lion and Sun
Iran's lions disappeared in the 1940s, but for centuries a lion holding a sword beneath a rising sun stood for the Iranian state.
The Persian onager
The wild ass of the plateau gave its name, gur, to the most famous royal hunter in Persian legend, and a pun on that name to Khayyam.
The goitered gazelle
A small, fast desert gazelle, and in Persian poetry the shape of the beloved's eye and the image of a love that will not be caught.
The nightingale and the rose
A plain brown bird with an extraordinary voice became the lover of Persian poetry, forever singing to a rose that does not answer.
The hoopoe
A crested bird of village orchards became the guide of Attar's Conference of the Birds, leading thirty birds to the king they turn out to be.
The Caspian horse
A small, fine-boned horse found pulling carts near the Caspian in the 1960s, and argued by some to echo the horses carved at Persepolis.
Sturgeon and caviar of the Caspian
Armoured fish of an ancient lineage, whose eggs made the Caspian famous and whose decline turned a luxury into a conservation emergency.