- The year 2024 marks significant milestones for snow leopard conservation in Nepal, one of the animal’s 12 range countries.
- A snow leopard was found roaming the country’s plains and provided a home in the country’s central zoo.
- With the launch of a new conservation action plan, the government has initiated a shift in its approach to save the animal.
- Snow leopards also found their way into the popular imagination of filmmakers and even cricket enthusiasts.
KATHMANDU — The elusive snow leopard (Panthera uncia), often described as the “ghost of the mountains,” has captivated the imagination of researchers, the general public and mountain communities for centuries. Fables related to this enigmatic big cat have been handed down from generation to generation, weaving a sense of mystery and reverence for the cat of the rugged mountain terrain.
Its uncanny ability to blend seamlessly into its surroundings, coupled with its natural aversion to human presence, makes direct encounters exceptionally rare. The snow leopard is so elusive that even researchers dedicated to studying this animal often go years without seeing one in the wild.
Despite their elusive nature, they play a crucial role in the mountain ecosystem as its apex predator and keystone species. That’s why the animal is one of the priority species for conservation activities in Nepal, where researchers deploy several techniques such as camera traps, tracking footprints in the snow and studying scat samples to learn more about snow leopards.
The year 2024 marked significant milestones for the animal for several reasons. While a snow leopard was spotted for the first time in living memory in Nepal’s plains, the government shifted its conservation focus from research to conflict mitigation. Similarly, a government committee is aggregating various studies carried out around the country to come up with a scientific estimate of its population. Here’s a summary of Mongabay’s coverage of snow leopards in Nepal in 2024:
Rare snow leopard sighting in Nepal’s ‘home of tiger’ puzzles conservationists
In Nepal, conservationists have traditionally considered tigers (P. tigris) the apex predators of the country’s southern plains, leopards (P. pardus) as that of the hill region and snow leopards in the mountains.
However, in January this year, a juvenile snow leopard was discovered in the town of Urlabari (which translates to “home of the tiger” in the local Santhal language) where the “ghosts of the mountains” have not been reported in living memory.
While climate change was the usual suspect, researchers said they believed the snow leopard may have come there after escaping illegal captivity; others said it could have lost its way during dispersal, a natural process in which young animals leave their birth area to establish their own territory.
Amid the speculation, a study published in October suggested that the animal may have ventured down from the mountains shortly before it was found during dispersal.