News about conservation around the world.
The Snow Leopard Trust makes it a priority to help train the next generation of conservation leaders in snow leopard range countries. Mongolian student Tengis is one such potential future conservationist. He’s also an ardent soccer fan, which is reflected in the names he chose for ‘his’ snow leopards.
Meet Garav, the Mongolian Wildlife Ranger whose leadership helped shape ‘her’ National Park into one of her country’s finest and most effective conservation areas.
A report by the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC has found that hundreds of these endangered cats die at the hands of humans each year.
A research camera in Mongolia’s Tost Mountains captures amazing footage of a wild snow leopard mother and her three cubs!
Researcher Saloni Bhatia has examined the role of religion on people’s attitudes toward snow leopards and wolves. She didn’t find significant differences between Muslims’ and Buddhists’ tolerance for these predators. Overall, the conservation impact of religion seems to be limited – but not insignificant.
UN Development Programme and the Government of Kyrgyzstan agree on US$ 1m GEF-financed global project to conserve snow leopards. The Snow Leopard Trust will be the implementing agency of the project.
A new study shows that climate change is threatening to disrupt or fragment large parts of the snow leopard’s mountain habitat. There are three core habitat zones that appear to have the potential to be safe refugia for the species though.
Researchers have captured the elusive big cat on camera in Shamshy, a former hunting concession that has been co-managed as a Wildlife Sanctuary by the Kyrgyz government and conservationists since 2015.
Amarsaikhan is a herder in the Tost Mountains of Mongolia. Everyone here calls him Amara. He has spent his entire life living alongside the elusive snow leopard – not seeing the cat very often, but feeling its presence much more frequently than he’d have cared for. Every year, snow leopards killed several of his horses and fawns—an expense he and his community could hardly withstand. Amara not only feared these cats – “to be honest, I think I hated them”, he says. On several occasions, he attempted to kill snow leopards that had come near his camp. Luckily, he never succeeded.
Snow leopards are notoriously difficult to monitor, in part because they reside in remote areas with unfriendly terrain. But they aren’t the only ones who live there.
