Snow Leopards discovered in Afghanistan!!

[FriedaKateM]

A surprisingly healthy population of snow leopards - a globally threatened species generally found in the high mountain ranges of Central Asia - has been discovered in one of the few peaceful areas of Afghanistan, a wildlife group said.
The discovery in northeastern Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor gives hope to the world’s most elusive big cat, a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said this week.
"This is a wonderful discovery – it shows that there is real hope for snow leopards in Afghanistan," said Peter Zahler, WCS deputy director for Asia programmes.
"Now our goal is to ensure that these magnificent animals have a secure future as a key part of Afghanistan’s natural heritage."
Snow leopards have declined by as much as 20 per cent over the past 16 years and are considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Camera traps set up by the WCS documented the secretive, usually solitary animals at 16 different locations across the Wakhan Corridor, a long panhandle free from the fighting that plagues most of the country, the group said in a statement.
Only between 4,500 and 7,500 snow leopards remain in the wild, scattered across a dozen countries in Central Asia. The cats are poached for their pelts and killed by shepherds guarding their flocks upon which the leopards sometimes prey.
The sleek, fuzzy-tailed leopards are also captured for the pet trade, while an increasing demand for their penises and bones in China - where some believe they enhance sexual performance - has also led to their decimation.
Conservation initiatives
In response to the threats against snow leopards, the WCS has developed a set of conservation initiatives to protect them, including partnering with local communities, the training of rangers, and education and outreach efforts, the group's statement said.
The New York based society, which works with the US government's aid arm, USAID, is also providing conservation education in every Wakhan school.
Anthony Simms, lead author and the project's technical advisor, said, "By developing a community-led management approach, we believe snow leopards will be conserved in Afghanistan over the long term."
The group has been working in the Wakhan Corridor, which borders China, Pakistan and Tajikistan, since 2006 on protecting wildlife including the Marco Polo sheep and the ibex.
George Schaller, a wildlife biologist with the society, has proposed creating a reserve in the region.
The WCS statement did not estimate the number of leopards in the corridor, but said they remained threatened.
In the past three decades, nearly 80 cubs have been born in the Bronx in New York, and have been sent to live at 30 zoos in the US and eight countries in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America.


Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

****I actually tried 3-4 times to copy & paste the picture of a snow leopard in this article, but was unable to do so. Hope you all enjoy reading...you cannot imagine these leopards still there, with all the fighting going on! Really glad to hear about this! Joan

[1938 Observer]

Joan,
Great article,sit back & enjoy this video presentation.

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[FriedaKateM]

November 26, 1978

Walking the Himalayas By EDWARD HOAGLAND

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THE SNOW LEOPARD
By Peter Matthiessen.

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Peter Matthiessen has made another of his epic trips for us--epic in the sense that he writes about them so much better than anybody else who has been undertaking journeys such as his in recent years. Though he also writes good novels, he has gone rafting on the Amazon, adventured in New Guinea, rattled through a substantial stretch of East Africa by souk lorry and Land Rover, chased sharks off the coast of Australia, and visited the Eskimos. Thus, among good writers he is something of a throwback.

This time he walked for five weeks under the massif of Annapurna, from the Dhorpatan to Dzong, over Jang La pass, between the Seng and Bheri Rivers, on to Ring-mo, and on over Kang La pass, toward Crystal Mountain in "the Land of Dolpo," before the onrush of approaching winter. His companion was George Schaller, who, though no Darwin at synthesizing or speculating, is a remarkable observer of matters of fact--probably the most enterprising of all present-day wildlife biologists. Mr. Schaller, at 40, had studied lions, tigers, gorillas and, indeed, dozens of other animals in passing. He was out to learn something about the November rutting behavior of Himalayan blue sheep, and maybe to see a snow leopard, a rarity and another interest of his. Mr. Matthiessen, older by six years, was after sights and premonitions from which to fashion a most complicated and ambitious book. For fame, for craft, for our enlightenment, they did us the old-fashioned honor of risking their lives.


Usually Mr. Matthiessen's companions have been a scruffy collection of shabby hirelings and rich macho playboys who were footing the bill. So--with his friend and with the noble Sherpas--there is a lightness to this walk for him. What is from time to time confusing is that, as well as this worthy company, he feels the presence of Buddha--the Awakened One-- here in high Buddhist country, having lately, in America, become a committed convert himself. Also, his wife has died of cancer, and so memories of her are interjected throughout this radiant but rather fragile, flickering book. In his "beloved" boots, a hoopoe feather in his hat, and leaning on his faithful stave, near spiritual rebirth, near death along the giddy canyon trails, he takes his omens from the fate of copper-colored grasshoppers and blue and golden dragonflies. Competing with the goldfinches for marijuana seeds, he sees the very spider webs shimmer from the forces of a cicada's song. He doesn't "clutch the mountain," which in ancient Assyrian, he says, was a euphemism for tumbling into death. When he is exhausted, a lamergeier's wing shadow sweeping across the snow "draws me taut and sends me on."


Inbound, they cross the Himalayas from south to north; then, outbound, from north to south, going up to 17,000 feet. This is saint and bandit country--hermit saints and pony bandits-- where mythic prophets riding astride flying snow leopards once battled the old dread mountain gods, who were assisted by hordes of snakes. It is a land of "air burials," where even the bones of a dead person that the carrion birds have left are pulverized and mixed with dough, so that they too will serve to make bird flesh. Griffons and golden eagles swoop low over Mr. Matthiessen as he sits meditating on the moutainside, mistaking him for just such a corpse.


On every trail there are prayer cairns and altars. Prayer mills turn in the torrents; prayer flags flap and prayer wheels spin in the wind. Yak dung fuels the lamasery fires, and yak butter the lamps. Stooping like a harmless dung seeker, Mr. Matthiessen stalks the rutting sheep. His favorite Sherpa, Tukten, does a yeti (Hindu for sasquatch) cry for him, and says there would be more yetis left if the villagers had not killed many with poisoned barley years ago. Mr. Matthiessen sees what he suspects is one, nevertheless. The sun is roaring, filling to bursting each crystal of snow. "There shall none learn to live who hath not learned to die," he quotes, in order to encourage himself along the dizzy ledges. Lightness of step and radiance of light--although the Buddha once cried out in pity for an immodest yogin who had wasted 20 years of life in learning to walk on the water, when for a small coin the ferryman would have taken him across.


Now, of course, it is not the all-too-facile fancy of a religious enthusiast that has accomplished the waterfalls of imagery that sometimes dash on for 20 pages at a clip. Rather, 20 years' experience at note-taking on the trail, of bird study and anthropological reading is at work here. Yet, still, the blue sheep, gentle leopards, wolves, yaks, foxes, ponies, and "exalted," "berserk" village mastiffs that threaten to rip him limb from limb are more exact and vivid as natural history for all of this adjoining mysticism. And most of us know, really, that in their airiness, the best of the holy men of the great world religions are probably right, even if we don't choose to invest enough of our time in readying ourselves for enlightenment of that type. So, Mr. Matthiessen's paeans and sutras, his plum-pit amulets and "oms," are not without justification, especially in this huge skyscape where the most awesome sequences of cliff and peak and snow and ice are juxtaposed one upon another. Warm tears freeze to his face as easily as he shouts with unexpected laughter. He has a playful step, when not crawling in semiparalysis along the edge of a drop-off. "All the way to Heaven is heaven," he tells port Mr. Schaller--who is sometimes alarmed by his rhapsodies--quoting St. Catherine as "the very breath of Zen."


Largely gone are the dry summaries, the highflown and impersonal plural nouns that have deadened many chapters of Mr. Matthiessen's previous books. A shard of rose quartz, the spores of a cinnamon fern, a companionable mound of pony dung, a dog barking at his pale tent in the moonlight, all may excite him as if this were his first--or at least last--day on earth. On the other hand, except for two or three poignant references toward the end, the interpolations concerning his wife seem not so much insincere as jimmied unnaturally into his diary. Though he must indeed have thought of her with grief and guilt under the circumstances, from falsity of placement and carelessness they do not fit.


Like other diarists, he was at the mercy of his original mood and jottings in preparing his book; and so on the fearful days, the slower, earlier stages of the trip, and scary, lunatic interludes when he was assailed by traveler's depression, we are served a lot of Buddhist theology and history whose accuracy or inaccuracy I cannot attest to. But it is much too telescoped for a layman (as the natural history is not). Furthermore--and this can be irritating--he often proselytizes, even if only to convince himself. And because five years have passed since the actual walk, the writer, as he neared 50, appears to have jammed in a casual, nostalgic but unsettling entire catalogue of his past trips--to Umbria, Paris, Galway, as well as more apposite "primitive" regions. Also a jumble of anthropological references to African customs, Andean, Pueblo and Canadian Indians, and the reading of many nights. He's simply haphazard in attempting some of these leaps.


But "things go better when my left foot is on the outside edge," he says. All of this physical and literary recklessness has had the effect of emboldening Mr. Matthiessen. Not John McPhee, Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey all rolled together have attempted a journey such as this. His ratty tent leaks--there is none of the natty, overefficient, L.L. Bean equipment Mr. McPhee always boasts of in the woods. His mysticism is harder won than Miss Dillard's, and not punctuated with cranky, quasi-political pronouncements, like Mr. Abbey's. If our few so-called nature or travel writers are not rhapsodists, who will be? And if Mr. Matthiessen had to attain part of his lightness by way of the conventional drug trips of the 1960's (as he describes), by fashionable all-day meditations in the lotus posture in the 70's, and jet flights to Tokyo to bang heads with a Japanese seer, nevertheless we must accept the evidence on the page that we have a veritable yeti here--somebody who on his own ground is leaving marks nobody else could make.


Mr. Matthiessen is undervalued as a writer right now. I think it may be partly because in his spare time he is also a socialite, and there is a long tradition of socialite writers--F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote are other examples--who, in the glitter of the company that they keep, themselves underrate the importance of their work.


In any case, Mr. Matthiessen has been getting better. My favorite of his novels is his most previous, "Far Tortuga" (1975), which is a daring feat of dialect and dramatic symmetry, about turtle fishermen in the Caribbean. Fitfully, this "Snow Leopard" seems to me his best book of nonfiction. Otherwise--again--his last would be. "The Tree Where Man Was Born" (1972) is not only a search through Africa for the birthplace of man, but somehow for Mr. Matthiessen's own birth, as if he wished to start over. He did find peace there for a few weeks, among the Hadza bowmen of Gidabembe, in Tanzania. Here, too, he does, among these medieval villages--Murwa, Shey, Rohagaon, Tarakot. Within a day's walk is a new tribe, perhaps an atmosphere utterly different. But what makes the search more interesting is that his focus has shifted from birth to death and transfiguration.


Edward Hoagland is the author of "Notes From the Century Before," "Cat Man" and "Walking the Dead Diamond River."

I found this to be the book, that I read many years ago. As stated previously on forum, I go through my books frequently, & pass them on in varied ways, & do not have this one anymore. Anyway, Peter M.'s book was my introduction to the very secretive, quiet snow leopard. If I remember rightly, he only caught a glimpse of one while he was in the Himalayas. And I do agree that he was kind of "spacey" in this book. Joan

This article is copyrighted New York Times