COURTESY DAILY MAIL
One of the world’s most beautiful and elusive big cats has been captured on camera.
There are less than 2,500 adult snow leopards left in the wild but one endangered creature has been spotted prowling high up in the Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan.
The shy cat pads nonchalantly up to a camera before snarling at it and moves away again.
The amazing pictures were captured as part of a three-year project on carnivore ecology, which included monitoring the snow leopard.
The animals are also known as the ‘grey ghost’ or ‘ghost cat’ because of their shyness.
The project uses non-invasive methods such as camera traps and genetic sampling to study the animals, instead of capturing them.
Scientists are trying to study the status and ecology of carnivores in remote areas such as the mountains of northern Pakistan.
Richard Bischof, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and leader of the study published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, explained that camera traps are a non-invasive solution to a common problem in wildlife monitoring – finding out who is where and when.
‘We are working in very remote areas, at high elevation and in rough terrain,’ he said.
‘This brings along a lot of challenges but also makes our work a fantastic adventure.
‘The snow leopard saw the pole with the camera and walked right up to it, looked into the camera and then walked past it.’
The scientists focused on photographing three predators – the snow leopard, the red fox and the stone marten.
Camera traps are often set for weeks or months but it takes approximately five times longer to photograph the elusive snow leopard than a red fox, even though both species live in the same area.
Sometimes scent lures were used to attract curious carnivores to the cameras.
Muhammad Ali Nawaz, director of the Pakistani non-profit Snow Leopard Foundation and the main collaborator in the study said: ’Studies such as this are important not only in terms of the knowledge they yield about wild carnivores and the methods used to study them.
‘They are also an opportunity to build the capacity of Pakistani wildlife professionals in the highly technical and continuously developing fields of ecology and conservation.’
