Tag Archives: snow leopards

Snow leopard and snow goose research

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This video is called Help save the Snow Leopards! Help The Snow Leopard Trust!

From the StarPhoenix in the USA:

From geese to snow leopards, scientist tracks wildlife

By Bob Florence

April 1, 2013

Gustaf Samelius saw a cat – a big cat.

Samelius was in southern Mongolia last November. His trip into the Tost Mountains near the border with China took two days, the ground covered by a skiff of snow.

Vultures flew above him in the mountains one day. He used binoculars to look at a shadowy image near a creek in the valley. He saw a dead horse. Next to the horse was a mountain ghost – a snow leopard.

“They’re majestic,” Samelius said. “They’re mystic.”

Samelius is an assistant science director with Snow Leopard Trust, an international group that protects the cats. A native of Sweden, he has a masters and PhD in biology from the University of Saskatchewan.

He joined Snow Leopard Trust last October. A month later he saw a snow leopard for the first time, going to the South Gobi in Mongolia to help Sweden’s Orjan Johansson do field work. Johansson has collared 19 snow leopards since 2008, tracking leopards by GPS radio signals for PhD research. Johansson finds out where the cats travel in the mountains, the size of their territorial range, their interaction with people and livestock.

Much about snow leopards is still being learned. What is known is their tail is like an extension cord. A metre long, the tail gives the cat balance on narrow mountain ridges and around loose rock. Snow leopards usually hunt at dawn and dusk. They eat Siberian ibex and blue sheep and partridge. In some areas they eat livestock. Instead of roaring, snow leopards make a puffing sound called a chuff. They can jump the length of a Greyhound bus.

After Johansson collared a young male early last spring he posted a message on his blog.

“Now we are eagerly waiting for the females,” Johansson said. “Pretty much the same as a lot of other guys on a Friday evening.”

The head office for Snow Leopard Trust is in Seattle. Samelius’s base is a wildlife research station in the forest of Riddarhyttan, Sweden, two hours west of Stockholm. His job with the trust is to promote and develop its conservation program. He travels. The trust has teams in Mongolia, China, India, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan. The five countries are home to about three-quarters of the estimated 4,000 snow leopards in the world.

“People in the mountains don’t have a problem with snow leopards per se, but they don’t want to lose their livestock,” Samelius said. “My driving principle is let’s not forget the local people. Collaborate. Keep the local people involved. All the people with the trust in Mongolia are from Mongolia. The same goes for the other countries we work in.”

Because herders in remote mountain areas make less than $2 a day, the trust has a three-point plan to help them and to protect snow leopards. Vaccinating livestock reduces the number of animals lost to disease. Insurance pays herders for livestock killed by snow leopards and discourages poaching. The trust buys crafts made by the families, selling camel wool hats and felt rugs and embroidered slippers on its website.

After visiting Mongolia last fall, Samelius plans to return in June.

When Samelius first arrived at the University of Saskatchewan in 1991, he thought he would be here for a year. It became 13 years. Ray Alisauskas, a research scientist in Saskatoon who is a PhD adviser, landed Samelius a technician’s job with the Canadian Wildlife Service. Samelius went to the tundra in Canada’s high north for a combination of work and school.

Nicknamed Goose, he studied snow geese on Egg River at Banks Island in the Northwest Territories. In Nunavut he tracked and caught Arctic fox at Karrak Lake south of the Arctic Ocean. He started each day by listening to Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. To bait fox traps he used sardines.

“A friend said if I ever write a memoir, call it Another Can of Sardines,” Samelius said.

“We gave ID numbers to each fox, but it’s easier to remember them by name. In the evening we’d sit around and talk about different names. Foxes could have rabies, so we always made sure to put welding gloves on. One time I had a young American guy with me. I said I would hand a fox to him. The fox pinched me hard. When I took my hand out of the glove my thumb was covered with blood. I’m thinking this is not good. I soon realized (the bite) didn’t go through the glove, which was good. We called the fox Captain Insaneo.

“Kangowan was a male I caught at his den in May. One of his eyes was all infected. Cloudy. Puffy. Next spring we caught him again. His socket was empty. I don’t know if the eye fell out or what. He was a tough bugger.”

Samelius enjoys adventure. When he was younger he read Robinson Crusoe, following his older sister Lotta’s interest in reading. He has studied wolverines and lynx. Last weekend he went orienteering, using a compass and map to travel by foot.

“I am a curious person,” he said. “I want to learn. I want to grow.”

Bring on the snow leopard.

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Unique Indian snow leopard photo

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The snow leopard photographed with its kill in Kugti Wildlife Sanctuary. Photo credit Wildlife Trust of India

From Wildlife Extra:

Snow leopard photographed in India’s Kugti Wildlife Sanctuary for the first time

Snow leopard study in India

January 2013. The Wildlife Trust of India have recently published the first photographic proof that snow leopard inhabit Kugti Wildlife Sanctuary in India’s Himachal Pradesh region.

Very little specific information exists on the snow leopard distribution and population in India. Rough estimates put the population at 400-600 along the Himalayan region in India, and about 4080 – 6590 across the world (12 countries where it is found).

The snow leopard in Kugti WLS was sighted dragging its kill (a young ibex) by researchers – Neeraj Mahar and Sajid Idrisi, during a WTI survey in 2010 to help the Forest Department prepare an inventory of the area’s wildlife. It was recorded at an altitude of 3376 metres.

Permanent or temporary residents?

“While this opportunistic sighting by our team established snow leopard presence in Kugti, it raised a number of questions. Is Kugti WLS and nearby protected areas a snow leopard habitat? Or do they follow the prey to lower altitudes during winter, possibly from Lahaul or other nearby areas? This can only be verified with further focused studies,” said Dr Rahul Kaul, Chief Ecologist, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), one of the authors of the recent study.

Five states, three in the western Himalayan region – Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, and two in the north-eastern region – Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, are known to host snow leopards in India.

Snow leopard habitat

“Snow leopards inhabit the non-forested zone above the tree line – around 3,200 metres in the western Himalayas and around 4,200 metres in the eastern Himalayas, going over the Greater Himalayan crest into the Trans Himalayan region,” explained Dr Yash Veer Bhatnagar of the Snow Leopard Trust and Nature Conservation Foundation, adding that the common leopards are ‘replaced’ by snow leopards in these areas.

“However, there is not yet any concrete range distribution map for the species in India. While there is some developing information about snow leopard from the Trans Himalaya, information from the southern face of the Himalaya is very scarce. Such information thus becomes even more useful,” he added.

A recently-published paper has recommended further studies to help generate baseline information for conservation of this endangered species.

The snow leopard is listed in Schedule I of the Indian Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and is classified as ‘endangered’ by the IUCN Red List. Yet, as other carnivores in India, it is threatened due to conflicts with people, retaliatory attacks, prey depletion due to competition with livestock and hunting, poaching, and unplanned development in their habitat.

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Tajikistan snow leopards, video

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This video is about Tajikistan: a camera captures a rare wild snow leopard.

From Wildlife Extra:

Snow leopard cubs – A video from Tajikistan

Snow leopards thriving in Tajikistan

December 2012. Known as the ‘Roof of the World,’ the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan are situated at the intersection of several of Asia’s greatest mountain ranges, and fittingly may represent some of the richest habitat for ‘Asia’s Mountain Ghost’ – the elusive snow leopard.

300 snow leopards in the Pamirs

Today, as many as 300 of the remaining 3,500-7,000 wild snow leopards are thought to live in the Tajik Pamirs – an area which provides a potentially critical link between the southern and northern regions of the snow leopard’s range, and may serve as a vital genetic corridor for the species.

Given the potential of this region as one of the world’s last snow leopard strongholds, big cat charity Panthera recently carried out two extensive camera trap surveys in the Pamir Mountains, including one in Tajikistan’s Jartygumbez Istyk River region in collaboration with University of Delaware graduate student Shannon Kachel and the Tajik Academy of Sciences.

While reviewing photos from the survey’s 40 camera traps, Panthera field staff recently uncovered incredible new images of a snow leopard mother and her two cubs, which they have made into a video. The playful cubs are shown licking and pawing icicles and attempting to climb a rock. Along with this entertaining footage, also included are stunning images of the snow leopard mother and one of her cubs inspecting the camera trap, their quizzical faces pressed up against the camera lens.

Healthy population?

In addition to this special glimpse into the hidden lives of snow leopards, this footage also potentially indicates that a healthy, breeding snow leopard population exists in the Jartygumbez Istyk River region of Tajikistan, within a well-managed trophy hunting concession. These data are particularly positive for the region’s snow leopard population when paired with evidence gathered in the summer of 2011 of snow leopard cubs (stealing a camera trap) in the Zorkul region of Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains (a collaborative project with Fauna and Flora International), approximately 100 km south of the Jartygumbez Istyk River region.

Scat analysis

Panthera scientists are reviewing all of the camera trap photos from the surveys to assess the size of the region’s snow leopard population and the significance of the Pamirs as a part of the snow leopard’s corridor. In addition, Panthera’s field staff and partners have collected snow leopard scat samples for diet analysis, are conducting surveys to evaluate the abundance of snow leopard prey species and are also assessing the management and impact of local trophy hunting concessions and nature reserves, which target snow leopard prey species.

Poaching and unsustainable hunting of snow leopard prey

Panthera’s scientists have identified poaching and unsustainable hunting of snow leopard prey, including ibex and Marco polo sheep, as a major threat to Tajikistan’s snow leopards. To address this issue, our field staff are working with local villagers and a trophy “prey” hunting expert to analyze the infrastructure and training needed to establish a community-based hunting program of prey species.

Community based programme

Scheduled to begin in 2013, this program aims to better regulate the current unsustainable hunting of ibex and Marco polo sheep to conserve Tajikistan’s snow leopards, while bringing direct economic benefits to local villagers through tourism operations. Ultimately, if successful, Panthera hopes to use this community-based prey hunting program model to implement similar operations in other Central Asian countries.

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