On the trail of the snow phantoms

‘Stones of Silence’, a classic by the renowned naturalist George Schaller changed me forever. I knew that I wanted to work in the high Himalaya and study the ‘mountain monarchs’, the herbivores of the high mountains.

Sighting the snow leopard appeared far-fetched, as Schaller’s travels over several hundred kilometres had just yielded one or two sightings. He called it the grey ghost of the Himalaya… Little did I know 20 years ago that snow leopard conservation would be my main job!

Snow leopards are medium-sized cats and since they don’t roar, they weren’t clubbed with the other large cats, but given a genus of their own, Uncia. Recent genetic studies place them closer to the tiger than the leopard, and taxonomists have renamed them Panthera uncia.

Overall, the range of snow leopards spans an estimated 1.3 lakh sq. km in India, which is about six per cent of the global range. The Indian territory, however, is estimated to house about 10 per cent of the global population.

Since the mid 1980s, some studies by the Snow Leopard Trust (SLT), Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and other organisations have tried to unravel the mysteries of this elusive cat. However, these initial investigations couldn’t yield much on the species, except some useful tools to monitor them - counting signs along landform edges, marking posts of the snow leopard. It is with the advent of camera trapping that some hope emerged to get a clearer picture of the species’ abundance.

Around the same time, the emergence of satellite and GPS based telemetry to track wildlife species emerged, making it possible to study and understand the movements and resource use of such species. Further, using nuclear DNA that it amplified from scats (faeces) of snow leopards, it is now possible to trace it to the individual, thus enabling population estimates over large landscapes too.

Since the past two decades, researchers from the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore (NCF), SLT and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore have been involved with studies to understand the species, its prey, human society and threats using both traditional and advanced tools and have been rewarded with some amazing insights on the species.

A key revelation was about the occurrences of the snow leopard and its prey. We realised that the entire potential area of snow leopards, from the treeline of the Greater Himalaya to the Trans Himalaya, from east to west, appeared to be occupied by the snow leopard. This region is thus very different from the rest of the forested tracts of the country where wildlife, especially endangered ones, are limited to protected areas (PA) alone. Protected areas in the rest of the country appear to be habitat ‘islands’ in a maze of human dominated landscape, but in the snow leopard areas there may be some valleys better than others, but the habitat appears to be contiguous.

Human use also appears to be pervasive, with the pastoral and agro-pastoral people depending on remote corners of the area for their needs. Human-induced barriers seem to be non-existent in the landscape. We realised that the PAs here, about 31 of them, cover substantial area, but still leave out many areas where good wildlife occurs.

People in much of the range rear livestock and have traded in their products such as meat, wool and cashmere. Due to changes since Independence and a move towards a market economy, these have often resulted in increased numbers of livestock.

Such areas have been overgrazed and degraded, resulting in severe competition with native herbivores resulting in a decline in their populations and even local extinction in some cases. Often this process is linked with increased dependence of snow leopard and other wild carnivores on livestock. The economic losses to people can be severe and can lead to retaliatory killing of the carnivores.