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.

The post India’s elusive snow leopard population at 718, reveals survey appeared first on The Teenager Today.

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

The post Roads to nowhere appeared first on The Teenager Today.