Endangered Snow Leopards Found In The Northern Part Of Sikkim

Tag : Wildlife, India, Snow Leopards, Sikkim

In a hope that the valuable information provided by yak herders may be true, WWF placed camera traps in the northern part of Sikkim to trace snow leopards. And the results were fruitful. In January this year, snow leopards were captured at 4 different locations by the camera traps. This news came as a motivation to several local youths from the village of Lachen who were engaged in this exercise.

A pilot effort by WWF-India, The camera trap study will now be implemented across the entire potential distribution range in Sikkim in multiple phases.

The snow leopard, a flagship species of the high altitudes, is a Schedule I animal under the Wildlife Protection Act of India and is listed as ‘endangered’ by the IUCN. Compared to the Tigers of India, information and conservation efforts of these rare cats are at scarce, mainly due to the high and inhospitable terrain.

Since 2006, WWF-India has been working in Jammu & Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim to understand the snow leopard’s status and distribution in India. In Sikkim, the exercise of setting up camera traps began in 2015.

Dr. Dipankar Ghose, director of the Species and Landscapes program, explained, “Addressing retaliatory killing of snow leopards due to livestock depredation, managing the population of free ranging dogs and securing livelihoods of local communities, especially by targeting the community resilience towards climate-induced changes, are the pillars of our conservation efforts in this region.”

This initiative of extensive camera trap study is expected to complete by 2017. This will provide a first ever database on the status of snow leopards. This information will be useful for formulating a snow leopard conservation management plan for the state.

Source - WWF

962Views