Snow Leopard- A Beautiful Leopard

Snow Leopard

The Snow Leopards are  exceptional, wonderful gray leopards live in the mountains of Central Asia. They are protected by thick hair, and their wide, fur-covered feet act as healthy snowshoes. Snow leopards have strong legs and are remarkable leapers, capable to jump as far as 50 feet (15 meters). They use their long tails for balance and as blankets to cover very sensitive body parts towards the severe mountain chill.

Snow leopards prey upon the blue sheep (bharal) of Tibet and the Himalaya, along with the mountain ibex found over the majority of the rest of their range.

Though these strong predators can kill animals three times their weight, they also eat smaller fare, such as marmots, hares, and game birds.

One Indian snow leopard, secured and observed in a national park, is reported to have consumed five blue sheep, nine Tibetan woolly hares, twenty-five marmots, five domestic goats, one domestic sheep, and fifteen birds in a single year.

As these numbers indicate, snow leopards sometimes have a taste for domestic animals, which has led to killings of the big cats by herders.

These endangered cats appear to be in dramatic decline because of such killings, and due to poaching driven by illegal trades in pelts and in body parts used for traditional Chinese medicine. Vanishing habitat and the decline of the cats' large mammal prey are also contributing factors.

Amur Leopard- Most Critical Endangered Leopard

Amur Leopard

 The Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) is regarded to be one of the most seriously endangered big cats in the world, with only 35 leftover in the wild, all in the Russian Far East. It is among ten living subspecies of leopard,  but it is particularly exceptional due to a specifically pale coat compared to most other subspecies, and dark rosettes which are large and widely spaced with thick, unbroken rings. This wonderful leopard is well designed to living in the harsh, cold climates of its range, with a thick coat that can improve as long as 7 cm in winter.

Size of Amur Leopard

 The female weight is 43 kg ( highest) and the male weight is 48 kg (highest).

Biology of Amur Leopard

 The variety of the Amur leopard formerly fitted the Amur River basin and the mountains of northeastern China and the Korean peninsula.

Today, it endures only in one isolated population in the Russian Far East, while there may be a few individuals in the Jilin Province of northeast China.

Threats of Amur Leopard

 The Amur leopard has been consistently hunted out of most of its previous range for its coat and for the bones

that are applied in Conventional Chinese Medicine. The local ungulates that make up the greater part of this leopard’s prey have also been significantly exhausted, leading the leopards to focus on domestic livestock, such as farmed deer, and therefore inciting further persecution.

The tiny population that endures today is under extreme risk of annihilation; genetic variation is low in small populations and they are incredibly insecure to any chance event such as an outbreak or large wild fire.

Amur Leopard Conservation

  The leopard is secured but a proactive conservation attempt is required instantly if one of the most amazing of the big cats is to be rescued from annihilation. Attempts to save the Amur tiger  in the same area are displaying symptoms of success but the leopard has been mostly neglected till now .