Scientists use clever trick to count ghosts of the mountains

Time of India

23-06-2025

NEW DELHI: Wildlife scientists while enumerating snow leopards in India during the last population assessment used a smart trick to make the elusive big cats in the high and rugged Himalayas pose in front of cameras and get their foreheads having distinctive patterns, akin to human fingerprints, photographed.
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They used a scent, which only had a localised effect, in luring and making a snow leopard bend down and expose its forehead to the appropriately positioned camera trap, according to a recent study that explained the methodology adopted to count the big cats, nicknamed 'ghost of the mountains'.
It was done by spraying a small amount of perfume just below the cameras that were deployed near their favoured scent marking rocks on high-ridge tops, said the authors of the study published last month in the open-access journal PLOS One. They added that once the curious leopards lower their heads to smell, the enumerators got their prized-unique pictures
Though the snow leopard population assessment in India was done during 2019-23 and the counting figure, total 718 in India, was released last year, the scent lure method was revealed in the study by Pankaj Raina from the Ladakh wildlife protection department and co-authors, including senior wildlife scientist at the Indian national science academy, Yadvendradev V Jhala, and others from the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India.
"We identified individual snow leopards through their unique forehead pattern," said the authors while underlining that every camera trap photograph was geotagged and stamped with the time and date information in the metadata.
"The photo-captured species were identified using an AI-based software programme, CaTRAT, customised to identify Himalayan species. The identified species were subsequently validated by biologists," they said.
The counting figures, released in 2024, show the highest number, 477, of snow leopards in Ladakh out of total population of 718 in India. Among the remaining ones, 124 snow leopards are in Uttarakhand, 51 in Himachal Pradesh, 36 in Arunachal Pradesh, 21 in Sikkim and 9 in Jammu & Kashmir.
Covering approximately 1.2 lakh sq km, the counting exercise was conducted using a meticulous two-step framework. The first step involved evaluating snow leopard spatial distribution while the second step involved estimation using camera traps in each identified stratified region. During the exercise, camera traps were deployed at 1,971 locations, including 956 in Ladakh.