Snow Leopard Trust

Nobody Knew A single male can range over more than a thousand square kilometres in the course of his life. An animal like this is rarely seen and counted with difficulty. For most of the history of trying to count this species, the honest answer has been that nobody knew. That matters more than it might seem.

Working closely with police and fellow rangers, Aibek* coordinated an operation to intercept and apprehend the sellers. The snow leopard had been trapped and killed inside the boundaries of a protected area, where these endangered cats should have been safe. The illegal hunters were arrested and fined three million soms, a substantial penalty that doubles when a snow leopard is killed inside a protected area. A snow leopard photographed by a camera trap in Kyrgyzstan.

Tanzin has watched this mountain long enough to know which slopes the cats prefer, which corridors they use to move between valleys, and where they are likely to be when the light comes up. By the time the tourists reach the ridge, cameras raised, breath visible in the cold, the cat is still there. Tourists in Kibber, Spiti Valley, India, watching for snow leopards. [Noam Keydar] Most tourists come from France, Singapore, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

A New Way of Tracking Wildlife In the Bashqar Gol Biosphere Reserve (BGBR), SLF is pioneering the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to monitor wildlife populations. Every living creature leaves behind genetic traces in its environment, through hair, skin, scat, or saliva. These fragments, though invisible to the naked eye, can be collected from soil, water, air, or animal droppings and then analyzed in the lab to reveal which species have passed through.

The New Cats F21(yellow on the map below) has been a familiar face on our camera traps every year since 2021. Our team was able to GPS-collar her for the first time a few weeks ago. We know she had cubs in 2024, and the second new addition to our study is her son! M26 (blue) has already separated from his mother, F21, and is starting to explore beyond Tost, which is typical behavior for young males, who tend to disperse widely.

Field Update from May 8 It was cold to begin with, but with a bit more than a week left of this spring’s field season, it’s getting uncomfortably warm to hike uphill. The good news is we’ve collared two snow leopards. The not-so-great news is we’ve collared zero ibex. I’ve deployed tiny temperature loggers in the eight snow leopard dens we have previously discovered. None of the dens are currently in use. If a female uses any of them later in summer, she will not notice the loggers.

The goitered gazelle (Procapra subgutturosa) is a medium-sized antelope native to the grasslands and semi-deserts of Asia. These animals are highly mobile, roaming and migrating across vast landscapes. This nomadic lifestyle makes them both fascinating and challenging to study. Last September, a team of community rangers and Snow Leopard Conservation Foundation (SLCF) staff fanned out across the Tost Nature Reserve.

High in the mountains of India’s Spiti Valley, the same Trans-Himalayan landscape where snow leopards roam, communities have been farming the same crops for thousands of years. The two traditional staples are barley and a little-known local variety called black pea, known in Tibetan as sanmoh nako or dhoopchum. These crops have sustained mountain communities for generations, but they are quietly disappearing. Images of black pea crop and agricultural system.

Most people grew up watching Sir David Attenborough. I didn’t. Which is perhaps why my early memory of the natural world doesn’t come from television. It comes from a place. A river cutting through the Himalaya. I remember its force and its scale. Growing up in India, televisions were scarce and wildlife documentaries even scarcer. My introduction to Sir David came through one of his books, The Living Planet, which I read and reread as a child. It opened up a world I had never imagined.

Tibetan snow cat Amur leopard Grumpy cat Manul “Manul” is the Mongolian name for the Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul). The species was first formally described by naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in 1776 near Lake Baikal, giving it its common English name. Birds Marmots Voles Pikas Pikas make up more than 50% of their diet across most of their range. This specialization is energy-efficient because pikas are larger and more nutrient-dense than most small rodents.