Find out what is happening in the lives of wild snow leopards at different times of the year:

• A Year in the Life: Summer
• A Year in the Life: Fall
• A Year in the Life: Winter
• A Year in the Life: Spring

The snow leopard mating season is between January and mid-March. Males and females are together for only a short time during the mating season, and males are not involved with cub rearing.

Female snow leopards are pregnant for 93 to 110 days, and cubs are born in June or July. Usually 2 or 3 cubs are born in a litter. Very rarely, snow leopards in captivity have given birth to up to 7 cubs at a time. In the wild, it might be hard for a mother cat to successfully raise more than 2 or 3 cubs because of the difficulty of feeding them.

It is thought that snow leopards retreat to hidden den sites to give birth in the wild, although there have been very few observations of such behavior. If snow leopards in the wild act as their captive relatives do, such rocky caves would be lined with the mother's soft fur. Cubs are small and helpless when they are born, and do not open their eyes until they are about 7 days old.

At about 2 months, cubs eat their first solid food. By 3 months they are following their mother around, learning how to hunt and other snow leopard behavior.

Cubs become independent of their mothers at 18-22 months of age. Female snow leopards will be ready to have their own cubs by the age of 2 or 3, while males become sexually mature by age 4. Because of the time necessary to raise cubs, female snow leopards mate only every other year.

In captivity, snow leopards have been known to live for as long as 21 years. Their lives in the wild, being much harder, are likely somewhat shorter. However, we do not know for sure how long they usually live in the wild. Tooth analysis of one wild snow leopard that was found having apparently died of natural causes indicated it was 10 to 13 years old.