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Uncia uncia
Status: Endangered
Size: 75-121 lb (35-55 kg); 2 ft tall by 6-7 ft long.
Number in the wild:
♦ ~4,000 - 7,000 (600-700 in zoos). Snow leopards, like many large predators are inordinately impacted by fragmentation of their habitat.
♦ Snow leopards are killed illegally for their incredible coats, and for body parts that are used in traditional Asian medicine recipes. The coats are worth incredible amounts of money. War torn countries in Central Asia could use a little extra dough (or any dough), and get no return for NOT indulging in the snow-leopard-fur-coat-trade. In other words, there is no incentive to keep them alive. And as more on more people graze sheep and goats within their home ranges, encounters that end with dead snow leopards are becoming more and more common.
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♦ Peter Matthiessen wrote a book in 1978 called the Snow Leopard in which he described a trek across the Himalayas he took with the famous zoologist George Schaller, in part in order to see a snow leopard. He saw first hand the habitat alterations that are happening, even in this remote area:
“In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save these remnants of his past.” -Peter Mathiessen (Snow Leopard).
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“… As we reach for the stars we neglect the flowers at our feet. But the great age of mammals in the Himalayas need not be over unless we permit it to be. For epochs to come the peaks will still pierce the lonely vistas, but when the last Snow Leopard has stalked among the crags and the last Markhor has stood on a promontory, his ruff waving in the breeze, a spark of life will have gone, turning the mountains into stones of silence." -George Schaller (Stones of Silence)
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Gestation: 3-3.5 months. Litters of 2-3 cubs are born between March and May.
Diet: Goats and sheep in the Himalayas, plus whatever small rodents they can catch.
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Range:
♦ Elevations from ~10,000-17,000 feet in the mountains of Central Asia, including Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, and China (60% of all snow leopards are in China).
♦ An individual cat may have a ‘home range’ of over 350 square miles!
Behavior:
♦ Snow leopards are seldom seen in the wild and are considered one of the most elusive predators on earth. Their incredible spotted coats act as a perfect camouflage to the hills and mountains of Central Asia, and their preferences for cliffs, ledges, ravines, and rocky slopes means they are seldom in areas where humans tread.
♦ National Geographic took a trip to northern India just to try and find a snow leopard. They weren’t successful, seeing only footprints of cats who had just passed through and were probably watching them. Here’s an excerpt from the article they published in August, 2005:
“ Hour after hour we scan the tortured Himalayan ridgelines, sunup to sundown, valley after snow-covered valley, first the Rumbak, then the Tarbung, now the Husing. Our binoculars trace and retrace the same jutting cliffs, the same craggy outcrops, the same scree slopes, over and over. Our eyes are red, tired, and bleary, and at nearly 13,000 (3,962 meters) unacclimated feet, we're more than a bit woozy.
I'm studying a handful of wild blue sheep on the near slope. They're grazing leisurely on tufts of sage, and one ram is particularly magnificent, his massive horns spiraling in on themselves. They're not picky eaters, blue sheep, which is good, considering this moonscape of rock and ice. I inch the binocs just above them, and there he is. A cat. A snow leopard. No doubt about it. He's crouched low, moving bit by bit. Then, suddenly, his long tail shoots straight up, and he's charging down the slope, rocks flying, limbs spinning, snow flaring. "There!" I cry, dropping the binocs and pointing.
Before anyone can respond, before I can be proven a fool, I look again. The sheep are still grazing, heads down, jaws working. Above them is poised a serrated granite outcrop, solitary and still. There is no cat. "Nothing," I say. "It's nothing. Forget it."
"Another one of those moving rocks," says Rodney Jackson, in his quiet way, scanning the opposite slope. "Just be patient." "
♦ So National Geographic decided to take another trip. This time they found them. You can read the full article here. I highly recommend it—a lot of interesting information on the current state of the snow leopard. Plus the pictures are incredible! (Copyrighted—go there to see them). Here’s how the article starts:
“When a snow leopard stalks prey among the mountain walls, it moves on broad paws with extra fur between the toes, softly, slowly, "like snow slipping off a ledge as it melts," Raghu says.
""You almost have to turn away for a minute to tell the animal is going anywhere. If it knocks a stone loose, it will reach out a foot to stop it from falling and making noise." One might be moving right now, perfectly silent and perfectly tensed, maybe close by. But where? That's always the question. That, and how many are left to see?”
♦ George Schaller writes this about their elusive (timid?) behavior:
“ …The snow leopard’s whole life is devoted to remaining cryptic – hiding from people, hiding from its prey, until the final rush when it can catch something. To my knowledge snow leopards have never become man-eaters like the regular leopard or tiger or lion. In fact, they are so un-aggressive and so timid that I have heard of a number of cases where a snow leopard gets into a corral with the livestock and the herdsmen simply goes in with a club and beats it to death…"
Other:
♦ In Northern India and Pakistan, it is traditionally believed that all snow leopards are female. When it is time to mate, she goes to the water’s edge and calls to the otter, who is always male. After they have mated, she returns to the mountains until it is time for birth. At that time she returns to the waters edge and gives birth to a male cub, who slips into the water and becomes an otter, and to a female cub, who goes home with her as a snow leopard.
♦ When tracing the history of the Indo-European languages (English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, etc.) to its origin (a protolanguage), linguists have looked for words in common amongst tongues (those being the words that likely all came from the same root). They look for words that may indicate a place, and have found that the early protolanguage includes many words describing mountains (meaning that those who first spoke it probably lived in a mountainous region) and snow leopards—an animal that has never lived in Europe! Using this and similar clues, linguists now believe that the precursor to today’s Indo-European languages was first spoken in eastern Asia—probably in eastern Turkey. You can read more about this here.
♦ Snow leopards can 30-50 feet in a single bound.
More information:
Snow Leopard Blog. Includes updates as a team tracks a snow leopard named Aztai, who has been fitted with a gps collar, in his home-country of Mongolia.
Snow Leopard Trust Fund. Sounds like just a site for donating money (which they will accept). But it’s also a great source of up-to-date information.
Snow Leopard Conservancy. Same as above.
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