The Snow Leopard Conservancy

Published in 2007

Rodney Jackson has devoted nearly 30 years of his life to protecting snow leopards, one of the world’s most intriguing and elusive species. Chosen as a Rolex Laureate in 1981, Jackson was the first to radio-collar endangered snow leopards in the wild. This dedicated wildlife biologist recognised that the people most in conflict with the species were the key to its survival. Passionate about conservation and empowering local communities, he founded the California- and India-based Snow Leopard Conservancy in 2000 to promote community-based stewardship of the snow leopard, its prey and habitat.

Rodney Jackson never dreamed that the snow leopard would become his life’s work. In the 1970s, while attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, he spotted a picture of a wild snow leopard in National Geographic magazine. Enthralled, he journeyed to Nepal, determined to photograph a cat so rare and elusive, it was like a “ghost you never see”.

In Nepal, Jackson witnessed several disturbing events that threatened the snow leopard. As part of traditional New Year celebrations, locals conducted mass hunts to supply their cook pots with blue sheep, the snow leopards’ mainstay prey. At the same time, the snow leopards (Uncia uncia) were entering poorly constructed livestock pens at night and killing dozens of trapped sheep and goats. The losses to local people, whose annual income was about US$200, were catastrophic.

Although revered as spiritual guardians of the mountains, the muscled, sinewy cats were viewed with fear and loathing by local people, including angry herders who killed them by shooting or stoning them, setting traps and poisoning carcasses. These actions, along with a lucrative black market in its fur, had earned the snow leopard “endangered” status in the IUCN’s Red Data Book.

“Hunters were selling snow leopard skins for $10,” recalls 63-year-old, softly-spoken Jackson, who is originally from South Africa. “That really said to me, this is such a rare animal, and it’s disappearing. Instead of photographing them, I need to be studying them. It’s also when I realised how important it was to understand local culture and the socio-economic dynamics that lead people to trap wildlife.”

Little was known about snow leopards at the time; no one could even hazard a guess as to how many of the shy, sparsely distributed cats roamed throughout the Himalayas. That only intrigued Jackson more and he plunged into his research.

Future conservation plans rested partly on a better understanding of the snow leopard, from its food habits to home range. Jackson devised a pioneering radio-telemetry project in which he captured five snow leopards in western Nepal, fitted them with radio-collars, then released and tracked them during the winter months for four years in the early 1980s.

“The study was made possible by Rolex and the Award I won in 1981,” he explains. “Without it, the project wouldn’t have happened.”

Even today, his snow leopard field survey is regarded as the seminal work on the cats. Over the intervening years, Jackson has built up an impressive body of fieldwork on the species. Accompanied by his partner Darla Hillard, who has written for adults and children about their experiences with the snow leopard, he has continued to research and travel to the cat’s remote habitat scattered over 12 Himalayan regions, including northern India, Nepal, and Pakistan.

Jackson will never forget that first thrilling moment in April 1982 when he ran his fingers through a tranquillised snow leopard’s long and “incredibly soft” fur; he was already deeply committed to its protection. By then, he had reached the conclusion that of all the pressures the snow leopard faced, human-cat conflicts posed the greatest threat to its survival.

“I’ve always felt that the success to preserving the snow leopards is to foster community-based stewardship of the species,” Jackson says. That in itself was a daunting challenge; extremely poor farmers had strong incentives to hunt wildlife. Poached pelts and body parts might provide them with a year’s income. While he felt empathy for the farmers and their problems, Jackson needed to help them see that the snow leopard could be worth much more alive than dead.

Jackson and Hillard launched the Snow Leopard Conservancy (SLC) in 2000 to ensure the long-term future of their work and with specific goals in mind: to address livestock depredation, a critical issue that had to be dealt with in order to save the cats from retaliatory killings; find ways to boost local people’s income; and strengthen community stewardship of the Himalayan ecosystem.

A key argument used by Jackson was the fact that snow leopards are an “indicator species” – a good, healthy population helps ensure that the rest of the “mountain web of life is in good shape”.

Educational campaigns and outreach programmes were soon initiated. Some solutions, like predator-proofing pens, were relatively easy and inexpensive to implement. In a few short years, SLC has begun to see tangible proof that their efforts are taking root.

In villages near India’s Hemis National Park, one of the key areas where SLC has concentrated its efforts, more than 80 per cent of the corrals have now been predator-proofed, preventing the retributive killing of an estimated 40 snow leopards. Indeed, Jackson says a single predator-proof pen is likely to save the lives of between two and five snow leopards.

More importantly, perceptions are slowly changing as SLC seeks innovative ways to engage communities. Some herders have released trapped snow leopards, or called authorities for help when one kills their livestock. One Nepalese man who lost a horse then killed a snow leopard in retribution, paraded the grass-stuffed carcass down the street, an old tradition that would have once earned him hero status for killing the hated leopard. Instead, he was chastened by his community and eventually fined.

“Another striking example is in Nepal’s Shey-Phoksundo National Park, which contains the country’s highest density of snow leopards,” Jackson says. More than 30 schools have participated in SLC’s Junior Ranger programme. “Maoist insurgents, who were shutting down other schools, were unable to interfere with this programme which was strongly supported by the community.”

Changing deeply ingrained beliefs and convincing herders to work with SLC will always be a challenge. “This,” Jackson reflects, “is where one of SLC’s key approaches comes in; we work very closely with local communities, looking at conservation actions that are rooted in local tradition.”

Economic incentives are a critical part of the equation. The SLC-India Trust was established in July, 2003, to help support community-based development. Under its auspices, and in partnership with the Mountain Institute, which promotes conservation and community development in the world’s biggest mountain ranges, along with local communities and tour operators, Himalayan Homestays was inaugurated in Ladakh, India, in 2002. Highly successful, it generates income for villagers, offsetting losses from snow leopards and other predators. Tourists are enthusiastic about the opportunity to stay with local people. SLC also provides training and equipment for nature trek guides, who earn income by leading tourists through the snow leopard’s habitat.

SLC-India Trust has trained over 90 Homestay providers at 15 sites in the Ladakh and Zanskar region, and provides support for 31 providers in five sites in Spiti, near India’s border with Tibet. Over 720 visitors, many of whom ranked the host service as excellent, toured these areas in 2005. Under the sponsorship of UNESCO, Himalayan Homestays will expand to other parts of India.

Rinchen Wangchuk, SLC-India Trust’s programme director and co-founder, often reports to Jackson on how important the venture has become to locals. Sonam Palmo, from the village of Ang, north-east of Leh, told Wangchuk: “I have earned up to $350 this summer and have now become the significant breadwinner of the house.” Participants use the extra income to send their children to school or contribute to a community fund.

Himalayan Homestays was recently lauded worldwide for its self-sustaining and profitable conservation programme. The initiative received Travel + Leisure magazine’s 2005 Global Vision Award for Community Outreach.

Jackson remembers that villagers sniggered and shuffled their feet when he and Wangchuk used to visit them. The reason for that became clear when Wangchuk told Jackson: “The herders at first could not understand why we named our organisation after a despised animal. Now they consider the snow leopards and other wildlife the ornaments of our mountains.”

Jackson and Hillard, who oversees SLC’s administration and field-based conservation education activities, are proud of these successful ventures. “SLC-India Trust is well on the road to self-sustainability,” Jackson says. Wangchuk and his team support a variety of initiatives from Parachute Cafes – tents made from recycled army surplus parachutes where village women provide refreshments for trekkers – to school programmes that teach environmental awareness.

Jackson’s field work continues to set precedents. Four years of systematic field research recently produced his comprehensive 2005 handbook on camera trapping techniques, part of a collaborative effort. Camera trapping (remotely triggered camera traps placed in well-defined snow leopard travel corridors) and DNA profiling (in which a cat’s intestinal surface liner cells are extracted from scat, revealing its sex and identity) are two of the evolving tools that Jackson believes will yield more accurate estimates of snow leopard populations, currently “notoriously difficult to enumerate”. Crude estimates place the global population between 4,500 and 7,500 cats.

In January 2006, Jackson found himself back out in the mountains he loves, slogging 193km in all along India’s frozen Zanskar River gorge, one of the most remote regions of the Trans-Himalayas.

The expedition, funded by National Geographic, was an opportunity to determine snow leopard population hot spots and the feasibility of a long-term radio tracking study in the gorge. Jackson, Wangchuk, and two SLC-India Trust programme officers planned to gauge local interactions with snow leopards, to find new sites for predator-proof corrals and give Homestay workshops for local women.

Jackson’s group, all but their guide novices to “ice walking”, probed thin ice, plunged thigh-high into frigid water half a dozen times, and navigated an ancient ice route along the partially frozen Zanskar River. At times, they were forced to scale sheer, icy cliffs.

Six days into the trip, he heard a terrifying whoosh and was engulfed in clouds of snow and stinging ice crystals. Jackson and Wangchuk barely had time to leap for safety. “Five minutes later, a tremendous, thundering avalanche swept the buttress, dumping 30 feet of snow where we had just been standing,” he says.

Jackson good-naturedly ponders the “measure of lunacy” needed to make such a trip, but the incident underscores his willingness to endure hardships in an endeavour that will ultimately benefit both the people and snow leopards. His gruelling trip was not without its rewards: he was able to train SLC staff in the use of a hand-held computer, the CyberTracker, recording the fresh snow leopard tracks they found every day. “We were disappointed not to be able to reach the isolated Lungnak Valley,” he says. “The avalanche danger was just too high. But we did secure the interest and involvement of the neighbouring communities in working with us, and the word will quickly spread among the hardy Zanskari herders.

“Good stewardship by locals — helping them to see the leopards, not as a threat, but as a valuable asset – is the key to any long-term sustainable conservation strategy for the leopards,” says Jackson.

Lynne Schuyler

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