Jeong.

Last spring, a camera trap caught a young male Jeong didn't have in his records. Shoulder and left flank rosettes with a pattern that matched none of the previous ones. A disperser: a juvenile leopard establishing its own territory for the first time. Jeong drew it that same night, by the light of the wood stove, comparing the pattern against the thirty-odd ones he already had filed away in his notebook. He named it Leo-17. The names are private, his own, and he doesn't share them with the team. But when a new researcher mixes up one individual with another, the disappointment shows.

Recognizing an animal individually changes the way you work. It stops being a census figure and becomes someone with a route, with habits, with a slope where it sleeps at dusk and a stream where it drinks at dawn. Researchers with PhDs use pattern-recognition software for this. Jeong uses pencil, paper, and three years of looking very slowly. The method is slower, but what passes through your fingers stays in a way a screen can't replicate. Abstract conservation — saving a species, protecting an ecosystem — becomes concrete responsibility when you know who you're tracking.

The mug is white on the outside and black on the inside. Jeong's portrait takes up the whole surface: the aviator helmet inherited from his grandfather, the shearling jacket with the collar turned up, the look of someone who's been awake since five-thirty in the morning. The ceramic handles heat and daily use well, which is what matters for an object you're going to use every morning.

Jeong drinks black coffee in quantities that alarm his colleagues at Land of the Leopard National Park. The first sip of the day is standing by the open window of the Barabash apartment, looking out at the darkness before heading into the field. The second is in the forest, from the thermos, with the drone already in the air and the thermal screen showing wildlife seven hundred meters out. Between those two coffees come the most productive hours of his day: the cold sharpens the mind, the silence focuses it, and data accumulates in the notebook without anyone breaking in.

The rosette notebook travels everywhere with him. Between its pages are drawings of spot patterns with quick notes — date, coordinates, estimated body condition — and the odd loose topographic map sheet folded in a hurry. Identifying leopards without software is an exercise in patience and in trusting what you see. Individual recognition is at the foundation of concrete conservation: knowing who's there, where they go, how much territory they need. Leo-17 needed a zone not covered by the monitoring network. Jeong proposed expanding it. It was approved. That's how this works.