Wildlife Conservation Society
HIDE AND SEEK Studying snow leopards in Afghanistan can be challenging.
A Forbidding Kingdom of Snow Leopards
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: July 25, 2011
Thomas McCarthy, director of the snow leopard program for the conservation group Panthera, has spent nearly two decades crisscrossing the absurdly rugged Himalayan plateau to study a magnificent, densely furred, rosette-stenciled cat that may well be the world’s most reliable no-show.
“I’m out here in snow leopard country for half of every year,” said Dr. McCarthy by balky telephone connection from Tajikistan, “and I can easily count on one hand the number of times I just happened to see a snow leopard.”
George Schaller, the renowned biologist and environmentalist and Panthera’s vice president, is vast in experience and reputation and normally raptor-eyed. “I put radio collars on a couple of snow leopards in Mongolia,” he said. “The radio tells me where they are, I go there, I look and look. I see nothing, unless the snow leopard chooses to move.
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