(Image courtesy: Sakhawat Ali)
Amazingly rare footage has captured a mother snow leopard and her three cubs trudging through deep snow in the mountains of northern Pakistan.
Sakhawat Ali, a ranger at the Central Karakoram National Park in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, spotted the elusive animals on March 13 in the remote village of Khusheh after tracking their tracks for two weeks.
“Seeing four snow leopards is a huge blessing because it indicates that their population is growing,” Ali told Live Science.
Snow leopards (Panthera uncia) are an enigmatic species of big cat that live in the mountainous regions of 12 countries in Central and East Asia, and sightings are extremely rare. Their snow-white fur makes them almost invisible against the snowy mountains they call home, and more than 70% of their natural habitat remains unexplored, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Ali said he had been spotting snow leopard tracks around the village since late February. “While I was on the roof of my house, I used binoculars to look at the mountains and spotted a female snow leopard with her four cubs,” he said. “I quickly approached and filmed them from about 250 meters [820 feet] away.”
Snow leopards are usually solitary creatures, so seeing four of them at once is a rarity.
“In [Khushe] village, we are used to seeing snow leopards, but no one, not even the elders I spoke to, had ever seen four snow leopards at the same time,” Ali told CNN.
According to WWF, female snow leopards give birth to an average of one to five cubs at a time. When the cubs are three months old, they begin to follow their mother out of the den to learn how to hunt in her environment. However, according to the San Diego Zoo, they stay with their mother until they are almost two years old.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, these large cats are on the verge of extinction: only 4,000-6,000 individuals remain in the world.
The Baltistan Wildlife Conservation and Rehabilitation Organisation (BWCDO), which shared Ali's video on Facebook, said the sighting was an encouraging sign of successful conservation efforts in the Hushe Valley area. However, the species still faces multiple threats.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, poaching, habitat fragmentation, declining prey numbers and climate change pose serious threats to the snow leopard's survival.
TOPICS wildlife conservation
Pandora DewanSocial Link NavigationTrending News Editor
Pandora is the news editor at Live Science. She also serves as a science anchor and previously worked as a senior science and health reporter at Newsweek. Pandora holds a degree in biological sciences from the University of Oxford, where she specialized in biochemistry and molecular biology.
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