Snow leopards turn from foe to friend in Tibetan Plateau

People's passion for animals in the 'Valley of the Big Cats' is being reignited

Protection and conservation of snow leopards in Sanjiangyuan is creating a sustainable tourism boom. Xinhua / Shutterstock

Dead silence, broken by rustling trees and birds fanning out of the dense woods. Eight seconds later, silence reigns again. Before long, a bloodstained big cat emerges from its snowy camouflage with a lifeless goat in its mouth.

This was Lu Qing’s first sighting of a snow leopard.

Lu travelled more than 2,000km from Shanghai to Angsai, in China’s western Qinghai province, in a quest to spot snow leopards in the country’s first national park.

“I feel like my heart skipped a beat when I saw that snow leopard,” Lu recalled of the encounter in Sanjiangyuan National Park in 2020. “That one moment made all the travelling worth it.”

For China’s wildlife enthusiasts like Lu, stringent Covid restrictions meant long-planned trips to Masai Mara or the Serengeti were virtually unattainable. Many have instead turned their attention Angsai, nestled in the Tibetan plateau's "Valley of Big Cats".

The vast area of uninhabited land is home to many endangered species, including snow leopards, leopards, brown bears and lynx.

On the Chinese internet, a quick search of “Angsai Valley of Big Cats” would return abundant posts of visitors trekking into the valley and making joyful encounters with the creature. “Everyone who is passionate about wildlife and conservation should come visit this place,” one user wrote on Xiaohongshu, a popular lifestyle social media platform in China.

Snow leopards are the flagship species in Qinghai’s wildlife conservation effort, creating a knock-on tourism boom after the creation of China’s first National Park, Sanjiangyuan, in 2015.

A young snow leopard on the Tibetan plateau. Photo: Natural History Museum

Shanshui Conservation Centre, an NGO focusing on conservation of wildlife and their habitats in the area, is working with local families to organise safari tours.

Since the project was given the OK from an environmental perspective in 2019, a total of 22 families have signed up to allow visitors to stay with the locals and experience the rare chance of sighting snow leopards.

It's a big responsibility. Angsai and Shanshui have introduced strict rules to protect the area. For instance, every visitor has to obtain permission from the authorities to enter the park and only 12 can be present in the valley at any given time. Guides are also required to carry infrared rangefinders to make sure visitors stay at least 200 metres from the big cats so as to not disturb them.

“We make sure the animals are not disturbed by our presence — we are the guests in their territories and we should respect that,” said Gama Suonan, a local host who now also works as a guide.

Each year, the families are randomly assigned a number and host visitors by numerical order to “ensure fairness”, according to Shanshui. Tourists pay 400 Chinese yuan ($58) a night for accommodation and 1,000 yuan for a vehicle and guide for a day.

A snow leopard at Angsai canyon in north-west China's Qinghai Province. Shutterstock

All the proceeds stay in the community, with 55 per cent going directly to the host families and 45 per cent used for wildlife conservation and building infrastructure in the village, such as hospitals and electricity grids.

“It was an amazing experience staying with my host in Angsai because they know the area well to take us to places where snow leopards often make appearances,” Lu said.

Apart from the programme of hosting visitors, Shanshui has also tried other methods to engage with the local community to advance the conservation effort.

The organisation set up 80 camera traps near the 1,750 square km village and trained 80 local yak herders to operate and maintain them. In 2017, Shanshui said these camera traps took more than 200,000 photos, providing important statistics on the conservation effort.

Avoiding human-wildlife conflict is also at the centre of the conservation plan. In Sanjiangyuan National Park, wolves, brown bears and snow leopards have repetitively ventured into villages and hunted domestic poultry, local villagers say.

“In the past, some people would kill these animals because they kept killing our domesticated animals,” Suonan said. “But now, with the compensation, people are less angry about these encounters, and it’s been helpful.”

Suonan is referring to the “snow leopard insurance fund” established in 2016. Donations and government support funnelled 220,000 CNY ($32,000) to the fund in 2017, for example, providing compensation for 222 incidents where wildlife caused monetary damage.

With the joint effort of local governments, NGOs and local villagers, the fragile ecosystem on the Tibetan Plateau, hit particularly hard by climate change, is undergoing a gradual return of these mighty mammals. According to Shanshui Conservation Centre, 85 snow leopards have been spotted in the Angsai region, creating more incentive for the visitors.

“I hope this programme can be sustainable and we can have more visitors come to admire the beauty of our nature,” Suonan said.