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The snow leopard has thick soft fur and a long bushy tail. The tail is used as a counterbalance when jumping, and to wrap around the body when the animal is at rest. Cream or smoky-greyish above, the lower parts of the body are white. In winter the coat often becomes paler. The pelt is marked with dark spots, rings or rosettes. The head is dotted with round black spots. As an adaptation for cold, the ears are small and very furry. They are conspicuously marked, as are the ears of most cats, with a central white spot on the dark backs.
Snow leopards are generally smaller than true leopards, and their tails are characteristically much longer. Their heads are notably more rounded than those of common leopards. Females are smaller than males.
Physically, snow leopards are completely adapted to moving in a montane environment. Their feet act like large snowshoes and their legs are designed for jumping. The hind legs are longer than the fore legs. Snow leopards have very large nasal cavities to enable them to efficiently utilise the oxygen in the thin, cold and dry air of high altitudes.
Snow leopards' eyes have round pupils unlike domestic and the other small cats. Anterior upper premolars are present. Panthera cats have cartilaginous portions in their hyoid apparatus, a series of skeletal elements which support the base of the tongue. In the smaller cats, the hyoid is completely ossified or bony. This, and a series of thick fibrous pads on the vocal cords, enable the large cats to roar. However, they are unable to purr continuously. The hyoid of the snow leopard is only partly ossified, and the vocal folds are only slightly thickened (Why Big Cats Can Roar. Cat News11, 1989, p. 17). Thus the snow leopard is unable to roar or to purr continuously.
No subspecies of snow leopard are recognised, insufficient information exists to determine significant differences between wild populations.
Snow leopards live in the mountain regions of central Asia. Their habitat consists of alpine meadows and rocky areas from the Hindu Kush, the Karakorum, southwest Ladakh, and Kashmir up onto the Tibetan plateau and north to the Pamirs, Tien Shan, the Altai and Sayan mountains and the Russo-Mongolian border; and east to Nepal, Bhutan and the Gansu, Quinghai and Sichuan provinces of China. They are found as far east as western Baikal in Siberia.
During the summer, snow leopards move high, to between 2,700 and 6,000 metres, even onto the snowfields and glaciers. In winter their prey tends to migrate to lower altitudes, then the snow leopard is found in the forests below 1,800 metres. Although they are most closely associated with arid and semi-arid steppe habitats, virtually devoid of vegetation, in Russia they spend all their time in coniferous forests, often as low as 600 metres.
The map shows the areas where Snow leopards occur in grey. The populations are badly fragmented and the animals hard to find, so this information is only tentative and the cats may be absent from large parts of this area or present in areas not marked.
Bharal, or wild blue sheep (Pseudois nayyar), have their entire range within that of the snow leopard. They form the principle source of food for the cats.
This region is too rocky for wolves and there are no other large predators.
Snow leopards are opportunistic predators; whatever they can kill is food. Markhor (wild goats), ibex, musk deer, argali (wild sheep), snow-cocks, monarch pheasants, red-legged partridge, wild boar, Persian gazelles, woolly hares and pikas are all important prey species.
Large prey is killed with a neck bite, crushing the trachea of the victims. This is a big cat technique, but snow leopards tend to crouch as they feed, as the small cats do. Panthera cats will sit.
The fæces or scats have been examined and herbs, soil, willow twigs and other vegetation have been found in them. Cats eat vegetation to aid digestion, vomiting and the elimination of fur balls.
In China it was estimated that 45% of their summer prey consisted of marmots. The people who live in this region kill marmots to save the vegetation for their own animals, and for their skins. As this prey base is depleted, the snow leopard is forced to hunt livestock, bringing it into conflict with the people. They will kill and eat horses, cows, yaks, domestic sheep and goats.
Snow leopards have never been known to prey on humans and there are no records of unprovoked attacks.
Snow leopards display flexible behaviour; they are active during the day, early morning and late evening and at night. Often patrolling mountain ridges, they may travel seven linear km in one day, mostly up and down valleys. They tend to spend most of their time on rocky broken terrain rather than flat regions. Snow leopards have been observed to rest in the nests of black vultures.
Males maintain specific home ranges of about 138 to 1,500 km2. They delineate their territories with scent marks, urine spraying and fæces, and by making scrapes. Marks are usually made at the junction of steep valley sides and the flat bottom lands.
Males and females probably have overlapping ranges, and pairs have been seen to hunt and to eat together. It is not known whether these are mother and offspring or mating couples. There seems to be some form of long-term pair bonding in snow leopards, which follows a relatively long courtship period. A captive male and three females were observed, the male would only remain with one of them. It is believed that the couple will separate as the cubs are born, but in captivity a male in Dresden Zoo helped to feed the cubs. It is not known if this happens in the wild.
Oestrus lasts for about three to eight days and they copulate relatively infrequently for a large cat, five to 15 times per day. At the point of ejaculation the male will bite the scruff of his partner�s neck.
The female dens in a rock crevice which she lines with her own fur. She may use the same den year after year.One to four cubs, weighing about 320 to 708 grammes, are born in April, May or June after gestation periods of 90 to 110 days.
They eat their first solids at about two months and one month later they are following their mother on hunting trips. They are sexually mature at about 18 months old and they then leave their natal range.
Although captive snow leopards have reached 21 years of age most are unable to reproduce after 14.
Snow leopard fur is extremely beautiful, as a consequence, it is very much in demand. Persecution in conjunction with low population densities, habitat destruction and local animosity, is taking them near to extinction.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) regard them as Endangered and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) have listed them on Appendix I, prohibiting all international commerce (Conservation and Legal Status of Wild Cats. Cat News12, 1990, p.26).
Local human communities are in conflict with the snow leopard because the cats take significant numbers of their livestock. In a survey (Snow Leopards and Livestock. Cat News 20, 1994, p. 12-13) most of the local people believed that the snow leopards ought to be eradicated. Proposals for compensation for livestock loses were deemed unsatisfactory. Losses to individual farmers are high.
Much of the total range of the snow leopard is within China. Not enough information is available for effective conservation. Although the Chinese Government has been recently promoting nature conservation, enforcement is extremely difficult. Skins continue to be sold on open markets. There was a reintroduction of a hunt in Mongolia (International Snow Leopard Trust Opposes Hunting. Cat News13, 1990, p.17).
There are more than 400 snow leopards in captivity, and this population seems to be breeding well. The goal of the Species Survival Plan for the Snow Leopards is to maintain a demographically and genetically stable population for 200 years (Wharton and Freeman 1988).
Rare and patchily distributed, the wild snow leopard populations are fragmented. The existing reserves are not big enough or insufficiently protected to adequately maintain the species (Recommendations for Snow Leopard Conservation. Cat News17, 1992, p.10-11). Numbers are very low but they continue to persist over a wide area. Crude estimates of wild populations have been placed at 1,500 to 2,900 individuals (Freeman 1988). The latest estimate of wild populations (1994) is placed at between 3-400.
Dr. Leif Blomqvist Helsinki Zoo Korkeasaari-Hõgholmen SF-00570 Helsinki 57 Finland
A captive breeding programme needs to have regard to keeping separate the various subspecies, while at the same time avoiding the dangers of inbreeding. This is achieved by the maintenance of a studbook which is used to select suitable breeding partners for captive animals. Such studbooks are maintained on a voluntary basis by dedicated individuals or teams at various zoos around the world.
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Snow leopards live in the mountain regions of central Asia. Their habitat consists of alpine meadows and rocky areas from the Hindu Kush, the Karakorum, southwest Ladakh, and Kashmir up onto the Tibetan plateau and north to the Pamirs, Tien Shan, the Altai and Sayan mountains and the Russo-Mongolian border; and east to Nepal, Bhutan and the Gansu, Quinghai and Sichuan provinces of China. They are found as far east as western Baikal in Siberia.
