- In January 2024, a snow leopard was found far from its usual high-elevation habitat, roaming in Nepal’s eastern plains — a region that’s the turf of the tiger.
- Researchers now conclude that the snow leopard, around 1.5 to 2 years old, likely lost its way during dispersal, a natural process in which young animals leave their birth area to establish their own territory.
- An analysis of the animal’s scat revealed the snow leopard had fed on blue sheep shortly before it was found, suggesting it had come from a higher altitude and ruling out the possibility that it had escaped from captivity.
KATHMANDU — A snow leopard found well outside its mountainous habitat in Nepal at the start of this year may have gotten lost while seeking out new territory, a new study says.
The male snow leopard (Panthera uncia), believed to be between 1.5 and 2 years old, was found on Jan. 23 in the town of Urlabari in eastern Nepal, near the border with India. The town sits at an elevation of 146 meters (480 feet), while snow leopards in Nepal have only ever been recorded at elevations higher than 2,000 m (6,600 ft).
There were initial fears that the snow leopard, which was found injured, may have been linked to the illegal wildlife trade. But an analysis of its droppings points to a more innocuous reason for how it got lost, according to the recent study.
“We found strands of hair belonging to naur [blue sheep, Pseudois nayaur] in the scat of the snow leopard collected after it was brought to [Kathmandu’s] Central Zoo,” study lead author Madhu Chetri told Mongabay. “This finding suggests that the snow leopard may have lost its way during dispersal and ended up in Urlabari.”
Naur are only found at elevations that overlap with snow leopard range, meaning the juvenile cat must have ventured down from those heights shortly before it was found.
Dispersal is the natural process in which young animals leave their natal range to establish their own home range, often traveling long distances. In Nepal, the high Himalayas make up snow leopard territory, while the hilly regions are home to leopards (Panthera pardus), and the lowland plains, where the lost snow leopard was found, are the domain of tigers (Panthera tigris).
Researchers also initially suspected that climate change may have had some role to play. However, Chetri, a snow leopard researcher with the semigovernmental National Trust for Nature Conservation, had maintained early on that he believed the animal got lost during dispersal.
Nepal still doesn’t have an official count of snow leopards in the country, let alone numbers to indicate whether their numbers are growing or shrinking. It’s estimated around 300-400 snow leopards (about 5-10% of the global population) roam Nepal’s mountains.
Rinzin Phunjok Lama, a snow leopard researcher and conservationist not involved in the new study, said the conclusion that the animal got lost during dispersal appeared the most likely. “Naur, a primary prey species for snow leopards, are found only at higher elevations,” he said. “As sub-adult [snow leopards] need to eat more frequently than grown-up ones, we could surmise that it hadn’t been long before the snow leopard had fed on naur meat when it arrived in Urlabari.”
He added this also makes it less likely the animal may have escaped from illegal captivity.
For their analysis, Chetri and colleagues extracted hairs, bone fragments and other materials from the snow leopard’s scat. “We then looked at the hair strands through a microscope. When we compared the cellular structure of the hair with samples from naur, we found a good match,” Chetri said. The team also found hair and claws belonging to unidentified small rodents.
“If the leopard had only eaten chicken” — a typical food for big cats kept in captivity — “we wouldn’t find any hair strands in the scat,” Chetri added.
The study authors also noted that at the time the snow leopard was found, in mid-winter, the temperature in low-elevation Urlabari was not significantly higher than summer temperatures in the animal’s high-elevation habitat. As such, “it seems that temperature might not be a limiting factor for the snow leopard’s movement in the lowlands … during the winter months.”
“However, the implications of such forays in the future possibly increase conflict with humans and other sympatric species like common leopards at lower elevations,” they added.
The findings come a few days after Nepal’s government launched its new conservation action plan for snow leopards, marking a shift in priority from research and monitoring, to conflict resolution, community engagement and combating wildlife crime.
Nepal’s mountain communities have long lived with the risk of snow leopards preying on their livestock. Often called the “ghosts of the mountains,” snow leopards are known to engage in “surplus killing,” where they kill multiple livestock in a single event, even if they only feed on one. Livestock have also been known to die just from fear when a snow leopard enters their pen. The conservation action plan acknowledges communities’ frustrations over these predation events and how these fuel retaliatory killings of the big cats.
Following the snow leopard’s capture, the Nepali government set up a committee, which included Chetri and veteran conservationist Karan Bahadur Shah, to determine the animal’s future. The committee recommended against releasing it back into the wild, citing concerns about its habituation to humans during recovery and the difficulties it would face adapting to natural conditions after extended captivity.
The snow leopard now lives at Central Zoo in Kathmandu, in a temperature-controlled quarantine shelter.
Banner image: A snow leopard was found hiding in the bamboo bushes in Urlabari. Image courtesy of Gopal Dahal.
Abhaya Raj Joshi is a staff writer for Nepal at Mongabay. Find him on Twitter @arj272.
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Citation:
Chetri, M., Gautam, B., Yadav, R. K., Gurung, R. K., Thapa, P. J., Subedi, N., & Pokheral, C. P. (2024). An unusual lowest elevation record of snow leopard (Panthera uncia) in Nepal. Snow Leopard Reports, 3, 46-56. doi:10.56510/slr.v3.23128