Help snow leopards win BBC World Challenge

September 28, 2011 Mongolia

One of my favorite Snow Leopard conservation projects is a finalist in the BBC World Challenge Competition. Please vote for Mongolian Snow Leopard Enterprises  This wonderful organisation helps save snow leopards in Mongolia by providing villagers with income producing alternatives so that they do not poach the endangered cats. Women all across central Asia are [...]

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What would David Attenborough say?

August 30, 2011 Saving snow leopards

A surprising announcement that the BBC wants to close down its 4-year-old Wildlife Conservation Fund, which has raised nearly $5 million for endangered species including snow leopards. The fund has raised the money mainly from fans of their fabulous wildlife documentaries, financing over 80 programs around the world. David Attenborough’s Planet series (in the Mountain [...]

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Afghanistan’s highest mountain open to climbers again

August 17, 2011 Afghanistan

After the recent good news of remote cameras photographing more snow leopards in Afhganistan comes another piece of good news. The country’s highest mountain, Mount Noshaq (7492 metres) is again open to the mountaineering community after many years closure due to conflict and insecurity. Mount Noshaq is located in important snow leopard habitat in the [...]

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Himalayan Tahr get great views at Sydney Zoo

August 16, 2011 Snow leopard habitat

The Himalayan tahr is an ungulate or wild goat that shares snow leopard habitat in the rugged wooded hills and mountain slopes of the Himalayas in Nepal, India and Tibet. They are key snow leopard prey in this region and in summer graze in high pastures, then come down the mountains and form herds in [...]

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Altai communities and snow leopards threatened by pipeline

August 11, 2011 Russia

Last year I travelled through a remarkable part of Siberia I knew nothing about, in search of Russia’s last snow leopards. In the Altai Republic and the Altai mountains I found a spectacularly beautiful region with a fragile landscape and local communities hanging onto unique traditions and livelihoods thousands of years old. Much of this [...]

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Adopt a candid camera and snoop on snow leopards in Mongolia

August 9, 2011 Mongolia

The Snow Leopard Trust’s (SLT) long term research project in Mongolia (partnering with Mongolian agencies and Panthera) is raising money by asking people to adopt one of the remote sensor cameras they’ve set up in the South Gobi province to film snow leopards in this beautiful region. This is a lovely way to support ground-breaking [...]

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Tibetan snow leopards speak to us from centuries past

August 3, 2011 Snow leopard habitat

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 [...]

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Electronic surveillance tells us new things about snow leopards

July 26, 2011 Mongolia

Electronic surveillance has been in the news a lot lately lately with illegal happenings in the Murdoch UK newspaper empire. But one place where surveillance is OK is in the work researchers do in snow leopard habitat. Snow leopards are so notoriously shy that the use of camera traps (which are set off by the [...]

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Kazakhstan snow leopards hit the limelight

July 17, 2011 Kazakhstan

We haven’t written much about the snow leopards of Kazakhstan in this blog as there has been little conservation or research work done there in the past. This is rapidly changing. “IRBIS – The Snow Leopard” about Kazakhstan’s rare snow leopards has just been published in English. Written by biologists Oleg and Irina Loginov this [...]

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More snow leopards found in Afghanistan

July 17, 2011 Afghanistan

News from a recent snow leopard study in Afghanistan suggests the war torn nation may have a healthy cat population in the mountains of the northeastern Wakhan Corridor. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), supported by USAID, used camera traps to photograph the solitary and shy cats. The study has been reported in the June 29 [...]

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