Nepalese Teenagers become Citizen Monitors for Snow Leopard Conservation

National Geographic (Stuart Pimm)

High in the Nepalese Himalaya, teenage students are monitoring wildlife in their community. They have made a surprising discovery.

Dr. Som Ale, Regional Director with the Snow Leopard Conservancy has been leading an effort to alleviate conflict between local people and snow leopards in Nepal’s northern regions. The Conservancy has partnered with the National Trust for Nature Conservation-Annapurna Conservation Area Project, to implement proactive, community-based strategies to enable people and wildlife to coexist more harmoniously on the Roof of the World.

Snow Leopard Cub Steals Camera Trap

CNN (Brian Walker)

“Wildlife researchers using hidden cameras have captured rare images of snow leopards in a remote mountainous region of Tajikistan — including shots of a cub stealing one of the cameras.

A research team sponsored by the conservation groups Fauna and Flora International (FFI) and Panthera set up 11 camera stations in the rugged Wakhan valley near the Afghan border and left them for three months to record what passed by.

Leopards Straying to Outskirts of India’s National Park

Hindustan Times, Mumbai

“The camera traps installed at various spots of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) at Borivli to monitor the movement of the leopards have found the spotted cat increasingly straying to the periphery of the park, according to the initial findings of a study.

“In the last two months, camera traps have captured at least five adult leopards. The reason these animals are straying to the fringes of the park is because of the garbage thrown which attracts dogs,” said Vidya Athreya, wildlife biologist, about the first quarterly report.

A Stealth Camera That Captures Big Cats

The New York Times (Leslie Kaufman)

“A few years back, scientists at Panthera, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting large cats worldwide, were lamenting the state of survey technology to a member of their board, J. Michael Cline. A major problem in protecting large cats, they explained, was monitoring the stealthy animals in the field. This is especially true of the endangered tiger, whose numbers in the wild are scarce.

At the core was a technology issue: the group used “camera traps” — cameras set off by motion detection — to count the animals in the wild. But the cameras were produced commercially for game hunters. The mass-marketed camera traps were large, heavy and often “slept” to save battery power. That meant it took them as much as a second to turn on once the motion detector was activated. For a buck grazing at a deer feeder, that’s fine, but for a wild cat, it’s an eon.

Lost Tiger Population Discovered in Bhutan Mountains

BBC (Matt Walker)

“A “lost” population of tigers has been filmed living in the Himalayas. The discovery has stunned experts, as the tigers are living at a higher altitude than any others known and appear to be successfully breeding. Their presence in the Bhutan highlands has been confirmed by footage taken by a BBC natural history camera crew. Creating a nature reserve around the tigers could connect up fragmented populations across Asia, preventing the extinction of the world’s biggest cat.

Tigers are known to live in the Himalayan foothills of Bhutan, though little is known about them, or how many there are. However, leading tiger expert Dr Alan Rabinowitz, formerly of the World Conservation Society and now President of Panthera, a conservation organisation dedicated to safeguarding big cat species, suspected that tigers may also be living at higher altitude, following anecdotal reports by villagers suggesting that some were roaming as high as 4000m (13,000ft).

Dramatic Photo Shows Jaguar and Cubs from Bolivia’s Kaa Iya del Gran Chaco National Park

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)

“The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) released today a dramatic photo of a female jaguar and her two cubs near the Isoso Station of the Santa Cruz-Puerto Suarez Gas Pipeline in Kaa Iya National Park in Bolivia. The adult jaguar, nicknamed Kaaiyana, has been seen with her cubs in the area for over a month; though WCS conservationists have confirmed she has been a resident in the vicinity for at least six years.

“Kaaiyana’s tolerance of observers is a testimony to the absence of hunters in this area, and her success as a mother means there is plenty of food for her and her cubs to eat,” said Dr. John Polisar, Coordinator of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Jaguar Conservation Program.