You can only climb so many slopes before you grow exhausted or encounter sheer cliffs.

It is just not possible to keep up.So Raghu tried capturing the cats to attach radios to them.He finally collared a female.But,like previous investigators,he was seldom able to monitor a signal for long before the animal dropped behind some ridge that blocked the transmission.Over the years,biologists reported snow leopards covering territories of five to fourteen square miles.But when American biologist Tom McCarthy first placed a satellite collar on one in Mongolia in 1996,he found it roaming 386 suqare miles.My guess is that the more sateillte collars we get out,the larger we'll discover snow leopard territories to actually be,said McCarthy,now the science and conservation director of Snow Leopard Trust.Ten years passed before the next satellite tag was put on,again by McCarthy,this time in Pakistan.By mid-2007 the cat wearing it had revealed its movements over a 115 square mile area and had moved across the border to Afghanistan.



Snow Leopard researchers need to together more than cat facts,because you can neither understand nor save a predator without doing the same for its prey.Snow leopards hunt chiefly Asia's high county array of hoofed wildlife,ibex,argali amd urial sheep,blue sheep,tahr,the goat-antelopes known as gorals and serows,Tibetan antelope,Tibetan and goitered gazelles,musk deer,red deer,wild boars,wild asses,wild yaks,and wild Bactrian camels.Marmots,hares,and mouse hares pikas are on the menu too,along with partidges and turkey-size snow cocks.On top of everything else,snow leopards rountinely add the tall,feathery shurb Myricaria and other plants to their diet.Curious,but then my house cat swallows grass and loves cantaloupe.




As the top carnivore of the alpine and subalpine zones,the snow leopard strongly influences the numbers and whereabouts of hoofed herd over time.That in turn affects plant communities and this shapes the niches of many a smaller organism down the food chain.The leopard's presence-or absence-affects competing hunters and scavengers too,namely wolves,wild dogs,jackals,foxes,bears,and lynx.This cascade of consequences makes Unica uncia a governing force in the ecosystem,what scientists term a keystone species.Since the range of the snow leopard overlaps those of so many other creatures,protecting its habitat also preserves homes for the majority of mountain flora and fauna.While we were exploring part of the Zanskar Range in Ladakh,Raghu and I crossed tracks that sent him racing off to an overlook.A few minutes later,a brown bear-the same species as North America's grizzly-galloped and slid down a high riverbank,swam across surging rapids,muscled halfway up a cliff wall,and finally lay down to dry its silver-tipped fur in the warm morning sun.We had found one of the last few dozen of its kind in that huge section of the Himalaya.Do snow leopards attack humans, as bears sometime do?No,never,Raghu says.He once watched a village girl pulling on one end of a dead goat,unaware that the other end,hidden by a bush,was snagged in a snow leopard's jaws.She came away unscratched.But a single leopard swatfest in a herd of livestock can plunge a family into desperate poverty.