Ajay Bijoor, a project associate in our India team, has written a wonderful article about his experiences with the management of feral dogs in the Transhimalayan landscape of Spiti, India. We’re reposting it here with the kind permission of Ajay and Current Conservation magazine.
An expert meeting held in Urumqi highlighted the enormous progress that’s been made in snow leopard research and conservation in China over the past years. Shan Shui, Snow Leopard Trust and Panthera have worked in partnership in China since 2009.
The Pallas’s cat is a small, little known wild cat species living in the steppes and mountains of Central Asia. Through a new research initiative “PICA” (Pallas’s Cat International Conservation Alliance) launched earlier this year, we’re hoping to better understand this feline. The project is still in its early stages, but it has already produced some outstanding, rare footage of Pallas’s cats, including video of wild cubs.
Feral dogs have been seen chasing snow leopards and bears away from their prey. Growing populations of free-ranging dogs are becoming a real threat to wildlife in many parts of the snow leopard’s range. Liu Mingyu, a researcher in China, is tracking dogs with GPS collars to better understand their behavior – and eventually address the threat they pose.
In our eco-camps, school kids in snow leopard habitat learn to reconnect to nature. The program has been a success in India and Mongolia for many years. Next year, we’re planning to launch eco-camps in Kyrgyzstan as well – so our Kyrgyz team visited a camp in Spiti, India, to learn from their colleague’s experience.
Gobi Gurvan Saikhan National Park, Mongolia’s largest protected area, is home to the endangered snow leopard and many other rare species. The Snow Leopard Trust has been partnering with the park for six years, training and equipping rangers for conservation and research. This week, the park celebrated its 20th anniversary.
One year after devastating flash floods washed away their livelihoods, dozens of families in our conservation partner communities in Pakistan’s Chitral district have been able to rebuild their lives – thanks to the generosity of Snow Leopard Trust supporters.
Check out candid footage from a ‘snow leopard signpost’ – or, as some would call it, a cat communications center.
Due to their elusive nature, snow leopards are extremely difficult to count. Despite great efforts and technological advances, we still don’t have reliable population numbers. Until that changes, these endangered cats are best served by a very conservative approach.
We are happy to see the comprehensive book on snow leopards and their biology that was published earlier this summer (1). However, a group of authors state in a chapter of this book (2) that the global snow leopard population may be significantly higher than prevailing estimates. This claim and its implications, which have been …
