When I first saw the Himalayas of Ladakh, I said to my partner, Mark, “How hard can it be? We are looking for a grey cat on reddish stones!” and he just smiled and confidently said, “You wait until you try to find them”. It was my first attempt to see and photograph a snow leopard in the wild. Mark had already been to Ladakh to search for them seven months earlier and had only seen them from a distance. He had visited in September. We were there in April. Frustrated by only distant sightings of leopards on two different trips we decided to try for them during the pit of winter at a time when snow leopards are descending into the valleys to search for food and a mate. It is the coldest time of the year in Ladakh.
We landed in Leh at the end of February 2015 and our guide Jigmet Dadul, from the Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust, met us at the airport. “There’s a cat that has been sighted near a village called Temisgam so maybe we should start to look there”. The next morning we gathered our small group of four together and started the drive towards a tiny village where an apparently older cat had been prowling the perimeter of the village buildings in search of food. After all, we knew from experience that if we saw this snow leopard, it may be the only one we would see all trip. We drove out of Leh and into a valley carved deep by the mighty Indus River.
En-route we got a call. The snow leopard at Temisgam had broken into a livestock enclosure and had killed six sheep! The minute we heard, we sped towards the village. When we arrived, I was surprised to see that we were walking right into the middle of the village.
We climbed the steep stairs inside the home of a Ladakhi family and emerged to a tiny, open-air courtyard. There, behind a mud brick wall, was a terrified snow leopard cowering in the corner of an enclosure. The six deceased sheep lay scattered around it. Outside the walls of the enclosure, every available piece of flat land was occupied by curious and excited Ladakhis. Even in Ladakh, the realm of the snow leopard, many local people never see a wild snow leopard in their lifetimes. The sense of agitation and excitement in the air was palpable.
We stood among them and tried to get photographs of the leopard from over the wall. As we watched, the melee that surrounded us and a few local men covered the enclosure with wire mesh to stop the leopard from escaping. Rangers had been called and were on their way. We assumed the villagers had been instructed to contain the cat any way they could. Meanwhile the cornered snow leopard crept over an inner barrier in the enclosure to hide.
“I want that cat dead!” exclaimed the owner of the sheep, a retired doctor. “It has killed six sheep!” An elder of Temisgam, his reaction made us gasp. It wasn’t all that long ago that the crowd would have heeded his calls and the offending leopard would have been stoned to death. But this time the young people of the village reacted by yelling: “You are not going to kill that cat! That cat is the emblem of our mountains!” It was at that point the local police intervened and calmed the assembled people down while they waited for the rangers to arrive.
Assuming the snow leopard was secure, I went with our group to a guesthouse for lunch. We had been watching the drama of the cat unfold for an hour and some of us were getting hungry. Initially, Mark thought he would join us but he forgot to get vital photographs of the dead sheep in the enclosure, and so he returned to the site. He arrived to hear a roar from the assembled crowd, and looked up to see the snow leopard breaking out through a hole in the thatched roof of the sheep pen before bounding off down the hillside through the village. Suddenly the villagers burst into pursuit. Mark joined the throng and ran with the crowd as they tried to stop the leopard from making an escape. Just when he thought the leopard was free, it came up against a 2.5-metre wire fence that had been kindly donated by a French NGO to keep yaks out of the fields. The villagers then cornered the leopard and it crouched in a ditch. Locating a gap in the crowd, it then sprung up and went to ground in another ditch. It was then that the wildlife officers arrived and the anow leopard turned around with a look of resignation on its face as it was covered in a net and taken away. The officers, well trained to handle leopards in these situations, were very gentle with the leopard and they took it away for a veterinary inspection.
Unsure of the outcome for this animal, we left them to it. In the short time we have been working with snow leopards in Ladakh, we have seen young Ladakhi people completely alter their mind-set when it comes to dealing with the big cats. Ten to 20 years ago, a snow leopard caught in this situation would have been killed. Outraged by the killing, authorities decided that cats who had preyed on livestock should be relocated to another area, a move which may have endangered the animal due to so little being known about the way they hold down territories. Now, as a new surge in snow leopard tourism eclipses Ladakh, young people are becoming more passionate about their conservation and through the careful guidance of the Indian Snow Leopard Conservancy, the region is becoming one of the easiest places in the world to see a one in the wild.
A snow leopard track in the snow.
That ease should not be underestimated, however. The search to find wild snow leopards is still strenuous, difficult and there is only a very small guarantee that you will actually see one. We were lucky. It was my second visit to Ladakh to see snow leopards, Mark’s third and we had a client with us who had searched for them over two trips spanning forty days in the Hunza region of northern Pakistan…
…The story continues in issue 154 of Wild Magazine. Subscribe here.
About Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust
In recent years the Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust has worked hard to change the attitude of people living across Ladakh towards Snow Leopards. Once highly persecuted across the region, the conservancy has developed a multi-pronged approach in conjunction with the people of Ladakh to form one of most comprehensive conservation programs involving a wild cat anywhere in the world.