What a magnificent beast is the endangered snow leopard, so rare that pretty much the only way to get a gorgeous photo like the one below is to set up a camera with a spring that takes a picture when jostled!
The radio show Living on Earth recently had a story about snow leopards and how Tibetan monks are helping to save them.
Steve Curwood interviewed Tom McCarthy of Panthera, a nonprofit that protects wild cats.
“CURWOOD: So, Tom, your organization, Panthera, has enlisted the services of Buddhist monks to help conserve the snow leopard. Can you describe this program for us please?
“MCCARTHY: Yes. Correct. It actually came from a PhD research project of a Chinese graduate student … and one of the things in mapping [snow leopard] occurrence that she happened to notice was that snow leopard range corresponded very closely to where most Buddhist monasteries were in the region.
“Around each of the Buddhist monasteries, there’s a number of sacred mountains, sacred lakes that they routinely patrol to keep people from violating any of their regulations or for killing any animals. And so she kind of put two and two together …
“So our partners at ShanShui, the conservation organization, went out and formed a partnership initially with four different monasteries, and what Panthera and Shan Shui do is provide the monasteries with a little bit of extra training, some of the basic tools that they need to do snow leopard monitoring, so now they can go out and not only protect snow leopards, but also count snow leopards. They do an awfully good job of talking to their followers about protecting snow leopards and the value of snow leopards in the ecosystem, and the end result is we have a much stronger conservation ethic being imparted to the people across the plateau through the Tibetan monks.”
Photo: Panthera
Camera trap photo of a snow leopard on the Tibetan plateau
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