Focus on Arts and Ecology

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HOW HAS THE SNOW LEOPARD SURVIVED?

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Thursday, June 18, 2020


A snow leopard, marking territory
PHOTOGRAPH BY SANDESH KADUR

By Rachael Bale, ANIMALS Executive Editor

In the 1978 book The Snow Leopard, writer Peter Matthiessen and legendary biologist George Schaller spend two months in the Himalayas trekking and tracking snow leopards. They never see one.

I first read this classic a few years ago at the urging of my colleague Peter Gwin. I was getting ready to go to southern Thailand for a story about the helmeted hornbill—a bird I likely would never see, and I was panicked: How can you write a good story about an animal you never see? Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard showed that it could be done.

My trip came and went, but the book stuck with me.

Earlier this year, when I heard Gwin would be reporting on snow leopards, my mind went immediately to the book. Gwin went 14,000 feet above sea level in northern India, joining photographer Prasenjeet Yadav, who for two years had tracked an old male snow leopard on foot and with camera traps.

“I thought a lot about Matthiessen’s book before the trip and was prepared for the possibility we wouldn't come across one,” said Gwin, who hosts our Overheard podcast. “Of course, I really wanted to see a snow leopard in the wild. But just venturing into its spectacular realm and knowing one was somewhere nearby, maybe even watching me, seemed thrilling and satisfying in its own way.”

Fate was on his side. He saw a snow leopard on his first day at the mountain village of Kibber. “Like all snow leopards, he was part phantom and would shape-shift, dissolving into these mountains like smoke from the village chimneys, dispersing into the cold, thin air,” he writes in our July issue.

I got lucky too. Was my helmeted hornbill a shape shifter like Gwin’s snow leopard? Not exactly. But in its own elusive and mysterious way, the bizarre bird was equally divine. Take a look yourself.

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