With only an estimated 3,500 to 7,000 snow leopards left in the wild, conservation programs are necessarily enlisting the help of local communities to increase the species’ chances of survival.
Founded in 1981, the International Snow Leopard Trust, which monitors the movements of the solitary cat in China, India, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, and Pakistan, also gives poverty-stricken local women training and equipment to produce camel-wool and related products which are sold internationally and via the Snow Leopard Trust online store (www.snowleopard.org/shop).
In this way, the women are able to afford food, medicine, and school bills, and the herding males no longer have to poach endangered snow leopards to survive. All profits are invested back into community conservation projects.
In Mongolia, the Trust, which is funded mainly by individual donors, members, and business partnerships, is also trying to ensure locals get the high price of the wool they deserve. By providing families with a regular buyer, rather than traveling traders, participants often increase their income from 25 to 40 percent.
Though snow leopards are sometimes poached for their pelts and bones, they are mostly killed in retaliation for preying on domestic livestock. Participants, of whom there are over 400, are learning to develop sustainable herding practices such as smaller herd sizes, so that there is more natural prey for the snow leopards. In addition, participants sign a pledge to stop the poaching of all snow leopards and their prey, and a cash bonus is given once a year to each compliant participant. If one person violates the contract, the entire community loses the bonus. Ecological workshops, eco-camps, newsletters, posters and other resources help raise awareness in villages.
Things are also looking up in the Himalayan provinces of India, the third most populous snow leopard region after China and Mongolia. Launched in March, Project Snow Leopard will include the promotion of alternative livelihoods for local people and public awareness activities.
In Ladakh (Jammu and Kashmir) and Nepal, where Peter Matthiessen wrote his epic book while researching the snow leopard with George Schaller in the 1970s, the Snow Leopard Conservancy (www.snowleopardconservancy.org) has launched a successful incentive program, whereby locals set up bed and breakfast accommodation for visitors in a spare room at a cost of about $13 a night. The organization also organizes snow leopard treks.
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Wildlife advocates are praising the recent passage of an act that seeks greater protections for endangered and iconic cat and dog species, including leopards, cheetahs and African wild dogs.
The Great Cats and Rare Canids Act, introduced by Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., garnered overwhelming approval by the House of Representatives on Tuesday, April 21. Passage of the act supports conservation programs, educational resources and increased monitoring and law-enforcement measures to prevent poaching and illegal trafficking.
The legislation would provide financial resources to restore populations of rare wild cat and canine species and protect their habitats. The bill was approved by a vote of 290-118.
The bill defines “rare felid” to: (1) mean any of the felid species lion, leopard, jaguar, snow leopard, clouded leopard, cheetah, Iberian lynx, and Borneo bay cat, including any subspecies or population of such a species; and (2) exclude any species, subspecies or population that is native to the United States and any tiger.
The act, HR 411, builds upon an existing program, the Multinational Species Conservation Fund, which provides funds to benefit tigers and other wild animals.
This new legislation expands that program to provide funds for additional wild cats, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
“Wild and rare cat and dog species are some of the most iconic animals on the planet,” said Dr. Sybille Klenzendorf, managing director of species conservation at World Wildlife Fund. “The bipartisan bill that passed the House will help ensure these majestic creatures continue to roam the wild for generations to come.”
Supporters said that the passage marks an important stride in the battle to save great cats from the loss of habitat and food sources. A vote in the Senate is pending.
Attention SLN Members: You can monitor the progress of this act by visiting the following website:
War-wearied Afghanis received uplifting news on Earth Day this year. Their government has announced the creation of the nation’s first national park, Band-e-Amir, protecting a one-of-a-kind landscape encompassing six sky-blue lakes separated by natural dams.
Announced by Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) at a ceremony in the FAO Building at the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Livestock in Kabul this morning, key funding for the park was provided by The United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
In addition, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) provided support with wildlife surveys, identifying park boundaries, and working with local government and communities. WCS developed the management plan and laws for the park. The park’s creators hope the system set up for Band-e-Amir National Park will be extended to new parks in the future.
“At its core, Band-e-Amir is an Afghan initiative supported by the international community. It is a park created for Afghans, by Afghans, for the new Afghanistan,” said Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Band-e-Amir will be Afghanistan’s first national park and sets the precedent for a future national park system.”
The park will be protecting one of Afghanistan’s most treasured natural areas. Six lakes resting high in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Central Afghanistan are separated by natural dams made from the rare mineral deposit travertine. Such systems are found in only a few place in the world, most of which are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, a future goal for Afghanistan’s first park. Pollution and human degradation of the fragile travertine dams currently threaten the park.
Unfortunately much of the park’s wildlife has already been lost. But surveys for the new park found ibex; urials, a wild sheep with massive horns; wolves; foxes; and the Afghan snow finch, the only endemic bird in the country. Snow leopards used to dwell in the region but vanished during the 1980s because of hunting.
While Band-e-Amir is not new to travelers it has been little visited since war engulfed the Afghanistan in 1979. After the nation gained some stability following the American-led invasion in 2001, thousands of Afghan tourists returned to Band-e-Amir. As well as natural beauty, the park has religious significance since it is believed the third caliph of Islam visited the region. With the new region’s status and publicity, the country hopes to attract international visitors.
Next on the list, Afghanistan is looking at creating a network of parks, including possible protection for the abundant wildlife in the Pamir Mountains.
Mamadsho Qadamshoev of the Pamir Biological Institute of Tajikistan wrote:
At 2:15 night on 4th – 5th of November 2008 in the countryside of Khorog town the taxi driver Mozimov Mulibsho wanted to cross the road by the small bridge and suddenly noticed that in the middle of the bridge about 3-5 meter far from him is staying a young Snow Leopard. The driver stopped the car and started to look at the beautiful creature. From the other side of the bridge 5 people were walking toward the Leopard. What do you think what did the young Leopard do in this case? Did it move toward the car or the walking people? Or it jumped to the river? No. The Leopard looked around and calmly as a domesticated animal walked toward the people and then moved straight to the side of mountains, where 15-20 meters far from the bridge the other big Leopard (female) was waiting for him. Both of them moved to the side of the Pamir Botanical Garden.
It turned out that for many years this bridge and other bridges of Shohdara River and the mountain rivers become a pathway for the Snow Leopards to move from the one side to another mostly at night time.
In this case the two Leopards were crossing the road of the North Ishkasim spine by the central bridge to Roshtkala spine, where the snow is lesser.
The snow is not steady in these rocky southern slopes and it avalanching right away. The part of the slopes where the snow melts becomes a pasture for the goats. For the last few years the mountain goats are the common prey for wolves and Leopards whose numbers are increasing and they make a herd of 30-35. In the spring (usually in April) the herd of mountain goats is moving to the northern mountainside and the beasts of prey – wolves and leopards also follow them. On May and September the main prey of the predatory animals is the red marmot, which is common in the mountains. Such is life of the predatory animals and their prey in the sever mountain condition where the winter is 60 degrees of frost with frequent snow-slips and in spring there mudflows and other natural disasters. Despite this thankfully life is continued in these severe mountains.
Snow Leopard Trust announces recipient of the annual
Freeman Award for Snow Leopard Conservation
Each year the Snow Leopard Trust and the family of Helen Freeman select one person to receive the Freeman Award for Snow Leopard Conservation.The selection is based on the person’s commitment and contributions to conserving snow leopards in the wild.The award carries with it a $1,000 USD prize.This is only the second year the prize has been awarded, the first Freeman Award having gone to A. Bayarjargal of Mongolia.
This year’s recipient is Alexander Esipov of Uzbekistan.
Alexander (Sasha) Esipov is the Deputy Director of Chatkal Nature Reserve and researcher with the Institute of Zoology of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences. He has compiled nearly 3 decades of field work primarily in the study of mammals of Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states. He developed a love of felids in the early 1980s and this brought him to snow leopards, a species he has worked tirelessly to protect ever since.He was a founding member of Asia Irbis in 1998, a regional NGO devoted to conserving snow leopards in the wild.Asia-Irbis formulated an action plan for the protection of Snow Leopard within the former Soviet Union and implemented several conservation projects with support from the International Snow Leopard Trust.
In 2002 Sasha attended the Snow Leopard Survival Summit in Seattle and played a very active role in development of the Snow Leopard Survival Strategy.He is now serving his second term on the Steering Committee of the Snow Leopard Network (SLN).
With funding from an SLT Small Grant, Sasha co-authored a Snow Leopard Conservation Action Plan for Uzbekistan in 2003.In 2006 he led an effort to collect and catalog all of the Russian-language snow leopard literature and make it available through the on-line bibliography of the SLN.He helped to write English summaries for nearly 300 scholarly articles.This undertaking has provided broad access to an incredible amount of previously published but difficult to access information.
In all of his efforts, Sasha is joined by his wife Elena, also a wildlife biologist, making them a real snow leopard family.
Alexander Esipov epitomizes the kind of drive and ambition to save snow leopards that Helen Freeman would certainly have appreciated.
Congratulations to Alexander, the second recipient of the annual Freeman Award for Snow Leopard Conservation!
The following snow leopard sighting was reported by SLN member Ashok Bhurtyal:
“This February, I was on a two-week long walk in the LangtangNational Park. On 21 Feb 2009, I spotted a rare snow leopard in the Cholang Kharka area. The young adult cat sprang up from the hillside onto the trek trail! It took a few turns around, saw me, was not scared of me, me neither! It was like a good friendship. I opened my handycam and caught it on tape, taking care not to scare away the beautiful cat. After about 10 seconds of filming, the leopard went slowly to I don’t know where. I followed the track but could not locate the animal again. Meeting this mammal was both unexpected and very rewarding.
I was in Langtang region to generate and offer some support for health and health care in collaboration with local peasants. Excitedly, I met the cat! I wish to share the video with interested individuals and organisations. And also hope to generate some support for improving health in Langtang.
Further, I would be very happy to find a competent videography expert/professional who would capture my mini DV cassette into media file to be stored and played on a computer. I can offer some remuneration commensurate with local prices prevailing in Kathmandu.
Sincerely,
Ashok Bhurtyal
Director of Programmes
People’s Health Initiative
(Volunteer group working passionaltely to improve health in Nepali Mountains) Kathmandu, Nepal”
GANGTOK: Pugmarks of a Royal Bengal Tiger have been found in the snow at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the Himalayas near Jelepla in eastern Sikkim after a gap of nearly 18 years, officials said.
Officials called it a rare discovery, since tigers are usually found in the plains and almost never above 6,000 feet.
The latest pugmarks were photographed March 27 in the Ganek-Lungto area in eastern Sikkim, Divisional Forest Officer (Wildlife) Karma Legshey said.
Tiger pugmarks were last officially recorded at this altitude in Sikkim some 18 years ago, by then divisional forest officer Tshesum Lachungpa.
Legshey said forest officials were on a routine patrol when they found the pugmarks on the snow in the northeastern part of the Pangolakha Wildlife Sanctuary in Sikkim.
The team then recorded the altitude of the pugmark site using the Global Positioning System. They also measured the pugmarks and photographed it, he added.
“The pugmarks measure 19 cm long and 17 cm wide with a stride of around 110 cm,” Legshey said, adding that a subsequent study confirmed the pugmarks as being those of a Royal Bengal Tiger.
He added that the trail of around 70 metres (of the animal’s track) resembled that of a tiger on a “normal walk”. The team then followed the track from Ganek to Devithan from where the terrain became too steep to follow.
“After making necessary arrangements at the site, we came down to Zuluk from where it was possible to catch the mobile telecom network and informed our superiors of our find. Immediately, a team from WWF-India, Sikkim Programme Office, led by Partho Ghosh, a tiger expert, left for the site and conducted necessary studies on the spot,” Legshey said.
“After interviews with local residents and senior officials, it was presumed that the animal is a female,” he added.
The residents in the area heard tiger roars in the past and also came across carcasses
of yaks and goats killed by the animal, Legshey said.
He said the tiger might have crossed into Sikkim from Bhutan through the Pangolakha Wildlife Sanctuary, which is a forest extending into the neighbouring country.
Currently, a team of forest officials is camping at Zuluk to monitor and alert the villagers, police and defence personnel about the probable presence of a tiger in their midst.
Meanwhile, forest officials have urged the local residents not to harm the animal even if it attacks livestock, and assured appropriate compensation in case of an attack.
Tigers have been reported to prowl in the forests of Lachen and Lachung in northern Sikkim at an altitude above 8,000 feet, but sightings have been rare.
At least four protected areas were on fire for an unusually long time until just a few days ago.
Nasa’s satellite imagery showed most of the big fires were in and around the national parks along the country’s northern areas bordering Tibet.
Active fires were recorded in renowned conservation success stories like the Annapurna, Kanchanjunga, Langtang and Makalu Barun national parks.
The extent of the loss of flora and fauna is not yet known.
Press reports said more than 100 yaks were killed by fire in the surrounding areas of the KanjanchangaNational Park in eastern Nepal.
Trans-Himalayan parks host rare species such as snow leopards, red pandas and several endangered birds.
Carbon source
More than the loss of plants and animals, the carbon dioxide emitted by the fires was a matter of concern, according to Ghanashyam Gurung, a director at WWF’s Nepal office.
Some of the national parks in the plains bordering India were also on fire, but those caused less concern among conservationists and forest officials.
“Fires in the protected areas in the plain lands can be controlled easily because we have logistics and manpower ready for that – and that is what we did this time,” said Laxmi Manandhar, spokesman for Nepal‘s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation.
“But in the national parks in the Himalayan region, we could hardly do anything because of the difficult geography. Nor do we have facilities of pouring water using planes and helicopters.”
Forest fires in Nepal‘s jungles and protected areas are not uncommon during the dry season between October and January.
Most of the fires come about as a consequence of the “slash and burn” practice that farmers employ for better vegetation and agricultural yields.
But this time the fires remained out of control even in the national parks in the Himalayan region where the slash and burn practice is uncommon.
In some of the protected areas, the fires flared up even after locals and officials tried to put them out for several days.
High and dry
So, why were the fires so different this time?
“The most obvious reason was the unusually long dry spell this year,” says Mr Gurung, just back in Kathmandu from LangtangNational Park to the north of the capital.
“The dryness has been so severe that pine trees in the Himalayan region are thoroughly dry even on the top, which means even a spark is enough to set them on fire.”
For nearly six months, no precipitation has fallen across most of the country – the longest dry spell in recent history, according to meteorologists.
“This winter was exceptionally dry,” says Department of Hydrology and Meteorology chief Nirmal Rajbhandari.
“We have seen winter becoming drier and drier in the last three or four years, but this year has set the record.”
Rivers are running at their lowest, and because most of Nepal‘s electricity comes from hydropower, the country has been suffering power cuts up to 20 hours a day.
Experts at the department said the severity of dryness fits in the pattern of increasing extreme weather Nepal has witnessed in recent years.
Had it not been for recent drizzles, conservationists say some of the national parks would still be on fire.
They point to “cloud burst phenomena” – huge rainfall within a short span of time during monsoons, and frequent, sudden downpours in the Himalayan foothills – as more examples of extreme weather events.
“Seeing all these changes happening in recent years, we can contend that this dryness that led to so much fire is one of the effects of climate change,” said Mr Rajbhandari.
Anil Manandhar, head of WWF Nepal, had this to ask: Are we waiting for a bigger disaster to admit that it is climate change?
“The weather pattern has changed, and we know that there are certain impacts of climate change.”
Gaps in the record
However, climate change expert Arun Bhakta Shrestha of the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) was cautious about drawing conclusions.
“The prolonged dryness this year, like other extreme events in recent years, could be related to climate change but there is no proper basis to confirm that.
“The reason (why there is no confirmation) is lack of studies, observation and data that could have helped to reach into some conclusion regarding the changes.”
Indeed, there has been no proper study of the impacts of climate change on the region: not just in Nepal but in the entire Hindu Kush Himalayas.
This is the reason why the region has been dubbed as a “white spot” by experts, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Limited studies have shown that temperature in the Himalayas has been increasing on average by 0.06 degrees annually, causing glaciers to melt and retreat faster.
The meltdown has been rapidly filling up many glacial lakes that could break their moraines and burst out, sweeping away everything downstream.
In Nepal and neighbouring countries, these “glacial lake outburst floods” and monsoon-related floods resulting from erratic rainfalls are at present the most talked-about disasters in the context of climate change.
If conservationists’ and meteorologists’ latest fears mean anything, forest fires may also be something that would be seen as one of the climate impacts.
In the wake of the 2007 United Nations climate change conference in Bali, Nepal has been preparing to join an international effort known as Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).
But if the forest fires it saw this year became a regular phenomenon, the country will instead be emitting increased carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – a case of climate science’s not very aptly-named “positive feedback”.
Residents of a Polish village are living in fear as a large wild cat stalks the rural area feasting on their livestock. Locals in the village – in Poland‘s southwest, near Opole – have been warned to only travel by car and to stay inside at night while the cat remains on the loose.Experts have analysed hair left at kill scenes and believe the cat to be a rare snow leopard. The animal is known to be fast, agile and very dangerous.However, the randomness of the strikes doesn’t fit with typical feeding habits associated with the breed, and experts are worrying the cat has upped the ante because it is bored.To date, the only image of the large cat is jumpy and grainy cellphone footage. But locals are convinced the cat is out there and are heeding warnings until it’s caught.
Video found here: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/viewmedia/74505Killer Cat Roams PolandResidents in south western Poland are living in fear of a mysterious predator blamed for attacking and killing livestock over the past few days.The animal is thought to be a rare snow leopard. It’s has been sighted numerous times around Opole and has even been recorded on a mobile phone camera by a resident of Biala village. At another location, a driver informed the police that a big cat had jumped over his moving car while chasing a deer.Second video link: http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/03/snow-leopard-in-poland.html
