Koustubh Sharma is what you could call a cat scientist with a daunting task, as a wildlife biologist studying one of the world’s most magnificent, fluffy-tailed and elusive big cats: snow leopards.
Based in Kyrgyzstan, Sharma spends a lot of time trying to solve the riddle of how to study the hard-to-study, threatened species. The alpine cats live in frigid, barren landscapes; roam hundreds of miles and are so adept at solitude that they’re dubbed “ghosts of the mountain.”
In the nearly 11 years that Sharma has studied snow leopards in the highlands of Central Asia, he has seen the thick-furred, rosette-marked feline only twice. His one close encounter was with a large male with a scarred face in southern Mongolia, while standing on a mountain ledge near a freshly killed ibex, a favorite meal for snow leopards.
“Suddenly, I hear a chuff and a snow leopard walks right in front of me. He looked at me with big round eyes, almost as if saying, ‘How did you get so close to me without me knowing it?’ They’re almost overconfident about their invisibility. Then he turned around and fled away like a ribbon,” says Sharma, a senior regional ecologist at the Snow Leopard Trust, a Seattle-based conservation nonprofit that works in China, Kyrgyzstan, India, Mongolia and Pakistan.
The cats’ covert nature hasn’t deterred Sharma and his team from studying them with camera traps, which helps the nonprofit understand and protect the species from poaching, mining, climate change and other threats. Snow leopards have dwindled to an estimated population of 4,000 to 6,000, making them so rare that remote cameras are one of the only feasible ways to study them.
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