Leopard in Gangotri National Park
A senior wildlife researcher has captured the movement of a snow leopard in camera at the Gangotri National Park in Uttarakhand. The development is vital as earlier the park authorities used to get digital evidence of the presence of snow leopard in their area through camera traps. This time a video with a proper camera was taken and it is considered the first by any wildlife expert in the Gangotri National Park.
The sighting of snow leopards is now becoming more and more frequent in Uttarakhand forest. Senior project associate Ranjana Pal of the Wildlife Institute of India was returning to her camp in the Nelong valley in Uttarkashi on Saturday when she saw the highly endangered mountain cat and filmed the movement through her camera.
Wildlife scientist Dr Satyakumr of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) says, “Ranjana Pal has been working on the snow leopard project since the past seven year with the WII. She is presently in Nelong valley in Uttarkashi. She saw some movement and got a glimpse of the snow leopard hiding behind juniper bushes. She waited for two hours to take the rare video of the snow leopard walking. Ranjana is possibly the first wildlife expert to film snow leopards in Uttarakhand forest. She had to wait for seven long years to see the snow leopard in the wild in Gangotri National Park.”
The population of the snow leopards has witnessed an impressive growth in Uttarakhand. Very recently the Uttarakhand forest department released data and the number has increased from 86 snow leopards in 2016 to 121 in 2022. The Dehradun based Wildlife Institute of India, country’s premier institute under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, annually installs camera traps during winter in the Gangotri National Park for monitoring. Senior Project Associate Dr Ranjana Pal is presently with the WII team in Nelong valley and got the rare opportunity of watching the elusive snow leopard in the wild on Saturday evening.
Expressing her joy, Dr Ranjana Pal tweets, “Happiest, international mountain day! While I had no trouble capturing them on camera traps, seeing them live was always a challenge!! My first snow leopard sighting in the wild! Words cannot do justice to the feeling!”
Earlier in 2019 an Indo-Tibetan Border Police Jawan created ripples by filming a casually walking snow leopard at Nelong, near Gangotri, through his mobile phone. The video with the snow leopard climbing a rocky ridge became viral on social media. This was the first possible instance of a non-forest staff successfully taking video of the rare cat.
A patrol team of the Gangotri National Park took mobile video of a snow leopard in 2020, but that was from a far distance and lacked clarity. The video of the Wildlife Institute of India team is one of the best taken in recent times. Ranjana took a video of a snow leopard with a professional digital camera last week.
Rang Nath Pandey, Deputy Director of Gangotri National Park, says, “The WII team has shared the video with the park. We get information about sightings of snow leopards from various places. For photographs and videos of snow leopards we depend on camera traps, which we install in different locations in the park.”
Snow leopards are found in Uttarkashi, Tehri, Rudraprayag, Chamoli, Pithoragarh, Bageshwar districts in Uttarakhand. A top carnivore of the ecological pyramid of the high altitude ecosystems, the snow leopard is considered as the flagship species for the high Himalayas. Snow leopard is threatened due to poaching for skin & bones (for illegal international trade). The Uttarakhand government is establishing a snow leopard conservation centre at Lanka in Uttarkashi. Snow leopards are found in Himalaya states/UT like Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh (Union Territory) Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and in Arunachal Pradesh. The biggest population of snow leopards exists in Ladakh.
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