Marc Foggin  is founding director of international NGO Plateau Perspectives and associate professor in the School of Geography and Life Sciences at Qinghai Normal University. He’s worked on conservation and community development projects in Tibet for 15 years.

He recently contacted “Saving Snow Leopards Blog” to report on exciting local snow leopard conservation work from this area of Tibet which has one of the highest densities of snow leopard in the world.

One of the first wildlife monitoring teams from a local grassroots organisation and the local monastery participated in snow leopard conservation work together with Plateau Perspectives. They observed many signs of snow leopards, including prints, scrapes, scat and traces of recent kills. Photo Marc Foggin.

“In a remote area of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in China’s western Qinghai province, local Tibetan herders have been actively protecting the snow leopard and other endangered wildlife in the high grasslands and mountains for more than a decade. Now, with help from non-profit organisation, Plateau perspectives, and the Sanjiangyan National Nature Reserve, they are also using “camera traps” to photograph the animals and document their distribution, range and behaviour.

The people of Muqu village are supporting snow leopard conservation by serving as park wardens, environmental advocates and as partners in applied wildlife research.

When locals are treated as genuine partners and allowed to voice their concerns as well as sharing their knowledge, there is a real opportunity to find better models for a sustainable future. If we are to succeed in protecting the snow leopard, for example, we must equally protect its fragile habitat. To protect the snow leopard is to protect the entire landscape and many other species and habitats will in this way be preserved as well.

For over a decade, around a dozen members of Muqu village have served as wildlife monitors and searched for snow leopards in their rugged mountain terrain. Many different signs can be seen – prints, scrapes, scat and kills – and several times a year, these herders report all their sightings as well as any instance of livestock predation or poaching. Now, with technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) and digital cameras activated by motion sensors, an increasingly clear picture of the conservation situation is emerging.

This photo of a snow leopard was taken by camera traps on 8 January, 2010 in the Tseren mountains. Photo Marc Foggin.

Since 2009, over a dozen camera traps have been set in the mountains of western Yushu, located according to the extensive knowledge of local herders. Nine individual snow leopards have already been captured on film, within an area of about 150-square kilometres.. Many other species also live here, including blue sheep, Tibetan antelope, wild ass, wild yak, black-necked crane and saker falcon.

But when snow leopards and wolves flourish, the number of livestock killed by these predators rises – and herders are starting to ask about financial compensation. On the one hand, people want to protect the land and wildlife, but on the other hand, the cost is sometimes high. Developing alternate sources of income for local herders is crucial, and the solution currently being explored is ecotourism.

While there are many challenges to developing a viable and equitable ecotourism project, the potential benefits have swayed tourism bureaus and several responsible business partners, community representatives and non-profit organisations to get involved.
Together we can find solutions to protect the high mountains, the grasslands and the wildlife of the Tibetan Plateau. And both the elusive snow leopard and local herders will enjoy the results

You can see more of this project’s photos in a Slideshow here.

A closeup of a detailed snow leopard rock carving from the Iron Age in Upper Tibet. We can clearly see the rosettes or spots of the cat. Copyright John Vincent Bellezza.

Petroglyphs are rock carvings made by many different cultures around the world since ancient times. People would use sharp stones and other tools to carve drawings into stone to record events and their world. The word comes from the Greek ‘petros’, meaning stone and the word ‘glyphein’, meaning to carve.

John Vincent Bellezza is Senior Research Fellow at the Tibet Center, University of Virginia, and Charlotteville, Virginia. A highly esteemed scholar and explorer, John has spent more than two decades studying Zhang Zhung, the ancient culture of western and northwestern Tibet, which was associated with the Bon religion, before the introduction of Buddhism.

John Bellezza has spent many years on painstaking research surveying rock art in Tibet. Copyright John Vincent Bellezza.

His studies included researching petroglyphs in remote mountain ruins and rock outcrops. One day he found these enchanting carvings. We can only surmise who would have made them and why but today they speak to us across thousands of years telling a story, a myth or a legend of snow leopards that some-one, all those years ago, felt was important.

I was in touch with John a few months ago and he’s very kindly agreed to share his snow leopard petroglyph photos with readers of Saving Snow Leopard Blog.

“These snow leopard petroglyhps were found in Uppper Tibet and they date from prehistoric times, probably the Iron Age (around the 10^th to 7^th century BCE).

One is a lovely close up of a snow leopard and the other a snow leopard with gaping jaws in pursuit of two wild ungulates (sheep or goats), with a crescent moon as well. We might surmise that this petroglyph depicts a dawn or dusk hunting scene, given the relative position of the moon.

Photo of a snow leopard rock carving from iron Age Upper Tibet. Copyright John Vincent Bellezza.

In Tibetan the snow leopard is called sa’u. It is the undisputed king of the alpine and aeolian biomes of Tibet. (Aeolian biomes are the zone of the highest life, a zone based on atmospheric nutrients, a zone of the wind as first described by L. W. Swan). The snow leopard is noted in Tibetan ritual literature as belonging to the entourage of important mountain gods. These ancestral and protective deities are said to keep fierce carnivores such as the wolf, brown bear and the snow leopard like ordinary mortals keep sheep and goats. The oldest cultural record for the snow leopard is found in Upper Tibet, a land of vast plains crisscrossed by lofty mountain ranges that run perpendicular to the Himalayan Range. This is the rock art record, prehistoric carvings in stone of snow leopards. It is not clear if these depictions of solitary snow leopards represent biological or numinous (that is the spiritual) forms of the animal. Perhaps this great carnivore was rendered in both guises.”

A petroglyph, this one a large wild sheep with huge horns carved 2000 years ago on rock in Altai, southern Russia. Photo Sibylle Noras.

Thanks very much for sharing these John. During my 2010 snow leopard trip to Altai in Russia I became interested in petroglyphs after seeing many rock carvings on the steppe near Koch Agash where we were researching snow leopard habitat. I found lots of ibex (wild goat) petroglyphs but sadly no snow leopards. Kyrgyzstan has petroglyphs of snow leopards too, at the Issyk Kul Open Air museum in Cholpon Ata and there’s a very special rock with an image of a tamed snow leopard used by nomads in a hunt much like ancient Egyptians used to use tame cheetah. Amazing!

John’s two latest volumes, Antiquities of Zhang Zhung, have just been published and are online at  www.thlib.org/bellezza.

This photo was orginally claimed by Xinhua News Agency (China) as one taken by a local amateur photographer but it was in fact taken by a camera trap by NGO Plateau Perspectives. (c) Dr Marc Foggin 2010.

Recently I cited a China news story from Xinhua News Agency about a photo of a wild snow leopard taken by a local amateur photographer. Turns out the Xinhua story wasn’t correct and in fact the photo was taken by Dr Marc Foggin, a Canadian conservation biologist and director of the NGO Plateau Perspectives (PP), who has been working in Qinghai Province (China) for the past 15 years

Dr Foggin this week wrote to “Saving Snow Leopards” website and we’d like to give him and his team full credit for the photos and also the conservation work they are doing. Dr Foggin doesn’t know how Xinhua got the photos but in any case, thanks for contacting us and we’re happy to correct the misconception, on our website at least.

The photos were captured when the PP team “set up a dozen camera traps in western Zhiduo County (in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture) on 31 Dec 2009 – 2 Jan 2010 and the photograph in question …was taken on 8 January 2010 at 4:44am.”

Dr Foggin writes that the camera traps are “part of our long-term, community-based snow leopard conservation program – with the local Tibetan herder community, as well as the Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve” and the data from the photos serves to “supplement Tibetan herders’ direct observations and records.”

Plateau Perspectives also has other photos of snow leopards from the camera traps and we hope to follow progress of their snow leopard conservation program in the future.

You can read more about Plateau Perspectives, their background and work in the 2009 Annual report. Read more about the Sanjianyuan National Nature Reserve.

Photo of wild snow leopard taken in Qinghai province, Tibet/China by amateur photographer, Ma Shengtang. Photo Xinhua. See Correction, this photo is (C) by Dr Marc Foggin and Plateau Perspectives

(See correction on the real source of this photo in the August 1st post).

An enterprising amateur photographer, Ma Shengtang, has successfully taken  photos of a wild snow leopard in Zhiduo County in Yushu, Qinghai province of China (formerly Tibet). The photos have been published by Xinhua, the Chinese News Agency and were taken with a long range infra-red camera.

Sparse and remote snow leopard country in Yushu, Qinghai province. Photo Wikipedia.

The region is sparse and mountainous with most of the population being Tibetan. The area was historically known as Kham, an eastern part of Tibet.

No doubt technologies are helping to make the snow leopard more visible than ever before. But hopefully it will be used to protect the rare cats and not hunt them.

Doma (r) making Tibetan Khapsey. Photo by Sibylle.

To celebrate the first birthday of the “Saving Snow Leopards” blog I’m going to post a recipe from each of the 12 snow leopard countries in central Asia during the next month. The first one here is one of my favorites – Tibetan Khapseys. They are traditionally made and eaten for Losar – Tibetan New Year. A couple of years ago I spent Losar in Kathmandu with my dear friend Doma who spent days making these lovingly for her family and friends. They were absolutely delicious!

Tibetan Khapsey shapes. Photo by Sibylle.

You’ll see from the photos that Doma shapes her Khapseys beautifully, and it takes her ages. I have given the method for making them much more quickly but you can copy her shape if you like.

Ingredients
1 kg white flour / 2 g salt /Vegetable fat to fry -ghee or vegetable oil / sugar

Golden brown Khapsey after being fried. Photo by Sibylle.

Method
Knead flour with the salt and enough water to make a thick dough. Roll the dough into medium sized balls.
Heat vegetable fat or oil in a deep pot or wok until it steams. Flatten out each of the balls until they are long and slim, about 10 cm long and give each a twist just as you dip gently into the oil. Keep them submerged in the oil and fry until the edges are toasted. Strain the oil and keep separated, preferably on the kitchen paper to get rid of excess oil. When still hot sprinkle lightly with sugar. Khapseys keep for months in airtight containers.