Ecologist and conservationist Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi has studied the snow leopard for about 20 years.
Suryawanshi just published the book “The Ghost of the Mountain: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard” about his findings over the past two decades.
How rare and difficult is it to see a snow leopard in the wild?
“Snow leopards are one of the rarest big cats on this planet. When I started 20 years ago [I had] a friend who thought he’d seen a snow leopard, but he wouldn’t tell anyone because he said, ‘I can get away saying I saw a Yeti. But if I said I saw a snow leopard, people would make fun of me.’ That’s how rare these animals are.”
What do they look like?
“They’re about 40 kilos, so like a big German Shepherd dog. But the tail is very long. It’s as long as their entire body length. They are very well adapted to the high mountains, very wide paws, very wide nostrils. The paws are like snow shoes that help them walk over the snow. And the fur is one of the densest furs of any mammals.”
Snow leopards can prey on livestock, and that’s where conflict arises with humans. How have you been able to help the snow leopard and humans coexist together?
“There are many things that we do all the way from compensation to insurances. But the most important lesson I learned was when we interviewed about 400 herders. Most of them, when asked, ‘What do you want us to do when a snow leopard kills a sheep or a goat?’ Most of them said, ‘It’s OK when they take an odd goat or sheep. What is not OK is when they get into our nighttime corrals and kill many.’ And so taking a lesson from that interaction, we now help herders secure their nighttime corrals so that snow leopards cannot get in and kill a lot of animals.”
How do the herders view you? How do you avoid going into these rural communities talking about snow leopards without coming off as the scientist who knows better than them?
“The most important thing is to have a long-term presence. So the place that I describe, I went there 20 years ago and I have been working in the same place every year for several months at a time. And so I’m almost part of the village now.
“And similarly, I have colleagues who have dedicated their lives to specific places. So when I go to those places, I go with my colleagues. And so it’s this long-term presence where people know that you’re going to come back, whether it’s a good year or a bad year, and that you’re there with them through thick and thin.”
You’re also a trained mountaineer. What kind of extremes have you had to endure over the years to study these animals?
“Minus-40 degree winters, harsh winds, a lot of snow and ice and very high elevation, which means the air is much thinner. And so it’s a combination of these that really makes it dangerous to live and work in that environment: the cold, the elevation and the ruggedness of the terrain.
“And the isolation: it can be very far and remote and there are no logistical lines, no supplies. Often there are no roads. So you have to be quite self-reliant throughout the winter.”
Why don’t the snow leopards get elevation sickness in the same way that humans do?
“That’s one of the big questions for researchers. We suspect that the snow leopards are either genetically adapted or, because they are born at high elevation and live at high elevation, they accumulate acclimatization over time and just repainted because they’re not coming down again and again.
“But what we do know is some humans, like the Tibetans, have genetic mutations that allow them to live at high elevations and snow leopards have mutations in the same gene that humans have those mutations in.”
Can you talk about the threats that these animals face?
“Snow leopards have very low genetic diversity, the lowest amongst all the cats. Now, what that does is it makes them very susceptible to fragmentation, where their populations get divided into smaller and smaller bits. And that would lead to inbreeding and inbreeding depression.
“There are more roads. There are large scale renewable energy plants. There are large-scale mining operation[s] and large-scale hydroelectric projects that are coming up within snow leopard landscapes. And these things are likely to fragment their habitat even more.
“The snow leopards’ range has the highest amount of international borders of any other big cat: 12 countries in Central Asia, [and] many of them don’t get along with each other. So snow leopards are really up against many different forms of human land use and climate change just makes matters worse every day.”
Are you optimistic about the future of this animal?
“I am very optimistic. I’m optimistic because of the people who live alongside snow leopards. [When you ask them], what should we do? Most of them said, ‘Look, snow leopards need to eat too. I’m okay if they take a sheep or a goat here and there.’ I have not heard that kind of promising interactions between people and carnivores in many places. And that is what gives me optimism for the future of this amazing species.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Book excerpt: The Ghost of the Mountains
By Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi
The Himalaya, India, January 2008
At minus sixteen degrees Celsius, it was warm for a winter’s day in the Himalaya. I was in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh, a huge gorge that cuts deep into the mountains of the Greater Himalaya and Tibet. Wind-lashed, with temperatures dropping as low as minus thirty-five degrees Celsius, this is a high-altitude land of vertical rock faces and torrential glacier-melt rivers.
I had come to study the winter foraging behavior of the blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur), a unique species of wild goat with sheeplike traits. Standing some ninety centimeters tall at the shoulder, the blue sheep live in herds that range as high as nineteen thousand feet above sea level. Superb climbers, they have an uncanny ability to “disappear” into the slopes and cliffs, where their gray coats camouflage them against the rocky backdrop. When startled, they give a burst of three or four loud football-referee-type whistles to alert their herd to danger. The males have thick, ridged horns that curl sideways and back, whereas the females have thin, short, straight horns. Found across the Tibetan Plateau and the Greater Himalaya, these blue sheep are known by many names—bharal in Hindi, yán yáng in Mandarin, naur in Nepali, na or sna in Tibetan, and more—and are the snow leopard’s favored prey.
My plan was to spend the winter of 2007 in Spiti, tracking the blue sheep herds as they foraged, meticulously recording their behavior and the plants they chose to eat.
That particular day, I had left camp at six in the morning and by half past seven reached the spot where I had seen blue sheep the day before—but there was no sign of them. I thought they might have gone beyond the next hill, but no such luck. After another two hours of look‑ ing for my study herd, I decided to rest a while before resuming the search. Tired and cold, I was now at the edge of a rolling plateau named
Hom. On my right was a gorge, a vertiginous thousand-meter drop to the Shilla River, an important tributary of the Spiti. When a golden eagle flew below me in the gorge, I pulled out my camera to photograph this king of the Himalayan birds, but the device refused to start; its battery had been drained by the chill.
An hour of hard climbing through knee-deep snow took me to the crest of the plateau at an altitude of forty-five hundred meters. I gasped for breath in the rarefied air. The endless Tibetan steppe extended in front of me, the dark and frigid gorge to the Shilla River on my right. Resting my weight on my ice axe, I was admiring the panoramic view when the cliffs below me suddenly came alive as a house-sized boulder plunged with a crash into the gorge. By now, I was used to seeing rock‑falls but never anything of this scale. A deep silence followed.
A chirpy whistle broke the quiet: the blue sheep’s alarm call. It rang from somewhere very close, but I couldn’t see the animals. Then I spotted them nearby in the gorge—a group of twelve blue sheep grazing on one of the rock ledges only a hundred or so feet diagonally below me. My systematic observation of their behavior and feeding could finally begin. Over an hour passed without much activity from the herd. The sky turned gray, and feathery flakes of powdered snow filled the air. My body stiffened. The whole canyon was frozen—boulders covered with snow, a few leafless trees, no water flowing in the gorge—and the only sounds were those of the occasional tumble of smaller rocks into the abyss.
A small movement caught the corner of my eye. This was not a falling rock; there was no sound. The movement was on the same slope as my blue sheep and me. I looked carefully where I thought the ripple had come from. It moved again, and this time I saw it: the ghost of the mountains. The snow leopard. He was so well camouflaged that I never would have noticed him had he not taken a step forward. The blue sheep were unaware of the snow leopard; the snow leopard was unaware of the blue sheep. He was on a ledge about four hundred feet below me and his prey.
He must have been there the whole time. He seemed young, a little small to be a full-grown adult. He sat down briefly but stayed alert, with his neck stretched, head up, and eyes scanning the horizon. I was trying to pick out any peculiarities in his fur to identify him, but it was impossible to fix upon details at this distance. He got up and started padding along the cliff, moving gently, hardly leaving a footprint in the deepening snow. I had become so familiar with these mountains that I knew exactly where that ledge would lead him. He would pass directly below the blue sheep herd I was watching, then below me, then finally emerge on a wider slope farther to my right.
Now the quest was to reach the starting point of the ledge before the snow leopard did and then hide there to get a better look. I ran at full tilt, struggling in the thin air. The shoulder of the plateau gave me complete cover from the snow leopard beneath. The start of the ledge on which the snow leopard walked was slightly broad and had a little grass on it, so it was no surprise to find a herd of blue sheep grazing there as well. Seeing these blue sheep in the path of the approaching snow leopard, I was certain about two things: The snow leopard had not yet arrived, but when he did, there was going to be a scene.
I took cover between two boulders, using the one in front to prop up my elbows like a tripod—for my binoculars—and the one behind me to support my back. Hours seemed to pass, but there was still no sign of the snow leopard. The weather had turned windy, and with the sun behind the clouds, the deep cold began to freeze the sweat on my clothes. I was considering whether the leopard might have turned and
gone when, suddenly, another alarm whistle rang out: The snow leopard had arrived. He must be close—the blue sheep were running—yet I could not see him.
I had to think like a snow leopard: Where would I be if I were him? I scanned the ledge along which I was expecting the snow leopard to appear and eventually sighted him sitting under an overhanging rock, perfectly camouflaged. He was indeed a little young. On many occasions, I had seen two sets of pugmarks—the footprints of a mother and her cub—in this very area. A camera-trap picture had shown the cub to be a male. Could this be him? Had he been weaned from his mother already? And where was she? Dead—or perhaps trying to mate again this winter? I was smiling with the sheer joy of seeing this incredible creature, but my mind was a roller coaster. Would he know how to hunt? Would he be able to make a kill anytime soon?
And then, without warning, the snow leopard got up and gently glided down the steep sides of the gorge, disappearing into the boulders at the bottom. Only then did I become conscious of my surroundings. An inch of snow had accumulated over the last few hours, a remarkable fall for one day in the Trans-Himalaya. The temperature had dropped further, and only when I tried to move did I realize that my feet had frozen. I had been sitting still for too long. I found an overhanging rock (just like the one the snow leopard had used for shelter), gathered some twigs, and lit a small fire. Taking off my boots, I gasped as warmed blood rushed into my feet, triggering intense pain—my toes thawing.
I sat for a while, my body aching with fatigue but my heart full of happiness. Under that rock, with the small fire to keep me toasty, the snow falling all around me, I was overcome with emotions.
I had seen snow leopards once before, but this was special. For the first time, I had experienced a perfect harmony between the mountains, the snow, the leopard, the blue sheep, and me. I had spotted one of the rarest animals in the world in its natural habitat and accurately predicted its behavior. The tranquility of the experience told me that I was not an outsider anymore. I was one with the landscape, and I felt accepted. It was impossible not to romanticize this encounter as an invitation into the world of the snow leopard. Studying this animal had been a dream of mine, and now I had been initiated. I was alone with the snow leopard and the blue sheep, deep in the Himalaya. In that moment, I understood what it meant to be a snow leopard biologist, and I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Throughout my career, I have continued to seek such moments of oneness with the mountains.
This book is about a twenty-year journey studying the snow leopard. Since I began focusing on this rare animal, the most common question I have gotten from people around me, whether at dinner parties or meetings of policymakers or government bodies, is about the number of snow leopards alive today. It’s an important question, since knowing that number might help unravel the causes of their decline and possibly even save them from extinction. A number can be fundamental to the conservation of a species and often draws more attention than highlighting the threats posed to its survival. A number gives governments a sense of control, a sense of understanding, and a sense of authority. Counting the snow leopard has been a critical part of my scientific research, and what it takes to answer that question is a central part of the exploration of this book.
Yet the question about the number of snow leopards is nearly always followed by a question about whether I’ve ever caught sight of this most elusive of animals. Why do we care so much about seeing wild snow leopards, and what fuels our desire to witness them in their natural habitat? Snow leopards have a singular grip on the human imagination. In the early 1970s, George Schaller, a wildlife scientist, became the first-ever person to photograph a snow leopard in the wild. The picture was published with fanfare by National Geographic just a few years after the moon landing, and the snow leopard became a symbol of the mysteries that still exist on planet Earth.
Then, in 1978, Peter Matthiessen, Schaller’s friend and travel companion, published The Snow Leopard. In it, Matthiessen writes of an expedition he undertook with Schaller, shortly after his wife’s death, to see the snow leopard in the Dolpa region of Nepal. Matthiessen never did see the snow leopard, but the creature’s allure—its aesthetic beauty, its idyllic but desolate mountain habitats, its wary, almost mythical behavior—draws us to this day. Shaped to perfection by evolution, snow leopards live solitary lives in the highest reaches of the Himalaya, surrounded only by glaciers, snow, rocks, and icy peaks. They are shy, and their silvery-brown-and-white coats, marked with dark rosettes, work like magic cloaks, offering such good camouflage that they can disappear in plain sight. They have long, furry tails—the longest of any cat in the world—which they wrap around their bodies like mufflers on cold nights. As they maneuver around exposed cliffs, their tails also work like the balancing poles of tightrope walkers. Their thick, wide paws, lined with fur, act like snowshoes, helping them walk on snow like elves. They are silent predators, unable to roar. They move through the cliffs and rock faces like smoke. For me, nearly two decades and several sightings later, every snow leopard encounter is still a transcendent experience, like the crack of dawn after a dark night. Seeing the snow leopard changed the course of my life, and every new snow leopard sighting reminds me to go in search of the unknown, instills me with a sense of meaning and purpose.
Snow leopards are an endangered species, sparsely distributed in mountainous terrain in the twelve countries that straddle the Himalaya and Central Asia. They are legally protected in all these countries, but given their remote mountain habitat and inaccessible high-elevation dwellings, their conservation did not gain urgency until recently. How could anyone prioritize the conservation of a species that we knew so little about? Knowing the animal would come before worrying about its survival. Snow leopards were safe, it was thought, in their rugged and isolated mountain abode; humanity would never breach their Himalayan kingdom.
But climate change now threatens the glaciers and rivers of the Himalaya. Globalization has connected distant places into a complex web of supply chains across the planet, where consumer decisions in distant countries threaten the survival of species they have never seen and, sometimes, have never known existed. Extractive mining has reached the highest mountain peaks and the deepest oceans, and there is no protection in even the most remote corners of the earth.
Yet the story of the snow leopard is one of hope. In my first encounters with the snow leopard, I mythologized them as part of a faraway world, removed from humans. But I soon came to realize how closely their lives are entwined with our human world. As my research progressed, I came to understand that I would be blessed with more glimpses of the snow leopard if I learned more about the things that surround them: the mountains where they live, the herbivores they hunt, and the people who share this landscape with them. During nearly twenty years of research, I have attempted to understand these entanglements as much as the biology of the snow leopard itself. The local people—the real custodians of the mountains and their wildlife—and my time spent with them have made me a firm believer in a bright future for the snow leopard.
Note on language
Throughout the book, I use the name Himalaya instead of the more pop‑ ular Himalayas. Himalaya is already a plural of the Nepali word himal, meaning “mountain.”
I have mentioned real people, and when I use a first name together with a second name, that is their real name. If I use only a first name, that means I am using a pseudonym to protect their identity
From “The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard” by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi published on August 25, 2026 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Tamagawa also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR
