India is home to 718 snow leopards, accounting for roughly 10-15% of the big cat’s global population. Conducted by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), the Snow Leopard Population Assessment in India (SPAI) Programme was carried out from 2019 to 2023 as part of the Population Assessment of the World’s Snow Leopards (PAWS), a global effort to determine the snow leopard’s numbers.

The survey covered approximately 120,000 sq kms of snow leopard habitat across the trans-Himalayan region. After camera traps identified 214 individual snow leopards, surveyors analysed leopard trails and other data to estimate the animal’s population at 718. Ladakh, with 477 individuals, is the leading snow leopard habitat in India, followed by Uttarakhand (124), Himachal Pradesh (51), Arunachal Pradesh (36), Sikkim (21), and Jammu and Kashmir (9).

The snow leopard is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In India, it is given the highest wildlife protection status. Its numbers in the wild face multiple threats, from habitat loss and poaching to infrastructure development.

Understanding the precise population of the snow leopard is important because of its role as the apex predator in the Himalayan ecosystem. Its population can indicate health of the ecosystem and help identify potential threats to its habitat, and shifts caused by climate change.

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Researchers from Pune and Kerala have rediscovered a rare and critically endangered plant species called Globba andersonii from the Sikkim Himalayas after a gap of 135 years.

The plant, commonly known as ‘dancing ladies’ or ‘swan flowers’ was thought to have been extinct until its “re-collection” for the first time since 1875 when the British botanist, Sir George King, collected it from the Sikkim Himalayas. Globba andersonii are characterised by white flowers and a “yellowish lip”. The species is restricted mainly to the Teesta River Valley region which includes the Sikkim Himalayas and Darjeeling hill ranges. The plant usually grows in a dense colony as a lithophyte (plant growing on a bare rock or stone) on rocky slopes in the outskirts of evergreen forests.

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A Himalayan butterfly named Golden Birdwing (Troides aeacus) is India’s largest butterfly. With a wingspan of 194 mm, the female of the species is marginally larger than the Southern Birdwing (190 mm) that Brigadier William Harry Evans, a British military officer and lepidopterist, had recorded in 1932. But the male Golden Birdwing is much smaller at 106 mm. While the female Golden Birdwing was recorded from Didihat in Uttarakhand, the male was from the Wankhar Butterfly Museum in Shillong.

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If you travelled the world in search of this handsome wild monkey, you would be forced to come right back to the evergreen forests of south-west India’s Western Ghats to breathe the air it breathes. In fact, thousands of tourists do just that… come to special places in India to see how beautiful our planet must once have been.

In truth, India is many nations rolled into one. The great Himalaya, the sub-Himalayan terai, central and peninsula forests, living coasts, magical coral islands, and even our cold and hot deserts… India has sights and experiences to offer that few other nations can match.

Apart from the tiger, arguably the most-loved animal on the planet, this lion-tailed macaque Macaca silenus, is one among thousands in India that can hold us in thrall. It thrives on fruits, but will readily take a bird, small squirrel, lizard, snail, spider or beetle! Its progenitors probably emerged soon after the dinosaurs threw in the towel when the first primate-like mammals made their appearance. This old-world monkey’s ancestry is, however, more recent, some three million years or so. That’s long, long before Homo sapiens dreamed up the false notion that they knew how to manage the planet better than Mother Nature!

Even more impressive than the way it looks (all purpose, no vanity) is what this primate managed to do with a little help from the likes of Prof. M. K. Prasad and Dr. Sálim Ali and a phalanx of scientists, poets, journalists, teachers and students. This motley group, prevailed upon India’s late Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi to stop the construction of a dam that would have drowned Silent Valley, one of the world’s most biodiverse jungles.

Some suggest this was the birth of modern-day, science-based environmental battles. Long before people began talking seriously about saving other species in the name of the tiger, this monkey managed to save a retinue of life forms, including tigers, leopards, elephants, sloth bears, wild dogs, flying squirrels, pangolins, birds, insects, fish and a gazillion plants, too numerous to list… many found nowhere else on Earth.

Clearly, India’s nature tourism potential is an under-utilised, under-appreciated asset. But our current implementation strategies need vast improvement if we wish to achieve the multiple objectives of biodiversity conservation, livelihood creation and brand-equity enhancement. We can do all this, without eroding our natural capital, provided we exhibit the same silent strength that has stood this macaque in good stead for millions of years and adapt to nature instead of trying to force our unproven survival strategies on our fragile biosphere.

First published in Sanctuary Asia, Vol. XXXVIII No. 10, October 2018

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What an exquisite sight. This curious snow leopard cub and its (out of frame) mother and sibling were photographed using a 24-70 mm. wide-angle lens by roving conservation photographer Shivaraman Subramaniam on 30 January 2016, while returning from the Siachen base camp. By comparison, it took decades of trekking the high-altitude havens of the Himalaya for Dr George Schaller to see his first snow leopard.

Alluring as the image is, the sighting is not a cause for celebration. Clearly Pantherauncia must somehow deal not only with hunters but killer traffic, too, as Bhutan, China, India and Nepal unleash a road-building frenzy of uncontainable magnitude.

At the Sanctuary Asia office in Bombay in 1986, I sat with the inspirational Dr Helen Freeman, Founder of the Snow Leopard Trust, speaking with anguish of how the illegal wildlife trade was successfully triggering retaliatory killing by Ladakhi herders because snow leopards could pick off an entire flock of penned domestic sheep in a night.

Helen and I were two among many speakers at the fifth International Snow Leopard Symposium in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, the same year; no one imagined that the high-altitude isolation we all quoted as vital to the survival of snow leopard, ibex, blue sheep, marmots and hare, might vanish like a wisp.

The snow leopard is a barometer for climate change in the Himalaya, and even way back then, though we spoke of impacts such as glacial melt and an upward-creeping tree-line, we did not factor in the possibility that together with rising human and livestock populations, habitat fragmentation and run-away road building could erode around a third of the snow leopard’s Himalayan habitat.

Apart from the countries listed above, help is being sought from mountain-dwelling communities to create 20 or more large snow leopard havens across such nations as Afghanistan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

The strike strategy, being successfully demonstrated by the Snow Leopard Conservancy in India, is to create culturally sensitive and ecologically responsible livelihoods where locals become the prime beneficiaries of both conservation measures and moderated tourism.

The moot question now is whether we will choose to take the road leading towards such sensible ambitions, or whether the money-men will herd us collectively towards their pie-in-the-sky Roads to Nowhere.

This article was first published in Sanctuary Asia Vol. XXXVI No. 10, October 2016

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