Snow Leopards

Snow Leopard Gallery Sichuan and Qinghai

Qinghai and NW Sichuan are now giving some wonderful chances for both Snow Leopard and Tibeatan Plateau mammal/bird watching. Also you have the added bonus of decent hotels in nearby towns such as Yushu and Shiqu and the availability of the airport for easy access at Yushu. Other animals in the area also make for great viewing - Wolves, Tibetan Fox, Pallas's Cat, Kiang, White lipped Deer, Alpine Musk Deer, McNeil's Wapiti and the occasional Lynx and Tibetan Blue Bear, Go further west and Tibetan Antelope and Wild Yak are also on the list.

Latest from August 2024 Qinghai Trip - photos Mark Langston

Short Report

Trips onto the Tibetan Plateau are never easy affairs, itineraries always vulnerable to factors far out of our control. This trip originally intended to visit the Snow Leopard site, Valley of The Cats, which was closed to the public due to ongoing safety work. Luckily, with Qinghai containing a wealth of wildlife habitat, we could easily compensate that loss with more than adequate substitute sites. Areas that not only gave a haul of 22 Tibetan Plateau mammal species, that included Snow Leopard, Tibetan Blue Bear, around 7 different Pallas’s Cat, the mega-fauna, Wild Yak, Kiang (wild Ass) and Tibetan Antelope (Chiru) of the Kekexili, Tibetan Wolf and Tibetan Fox, three rare and range restricted deer, White-lipped, Sichuan (MacNeill’s) and Alpine Musk and, last but not least, great views of two very slippery characters, Mountain Weasel and Steppe Polecat – but also gave daily access to hotel facilities with on-suite hot-showers and sit-down toilets. A far cry from the days of pioneer Snow Leopard watching – or even what you might have expected a few years ago.

The Snow Leopards were obviously the highlight of the trip. A lot of scanning went into the single sighting of two animals, it took until the very last day and hour to find them. A possible sighting was made some days before by ZZ, but, after a very brief view, that animal was never picked up again. The Snow Leopard pair came down a green ridge line and on to an easily viewable rocky ledge, where they exhibited interactive behaviour – moving together, growling and pronounced posturing. We speculated whether they were larger siblings that hadn’t split, but past observations of a local female Leopard with cubs had shown that, even outside normal mating season, male Leopards will approach and interact with females – the behaviour of the cats, viewed for around 20 minutes, mafe us think that this was the case – a meeting of two unrelated animals of opposite sexes.

Full Mammal List