This post is also at Facebook if you'd like to comment.
I'll talk more soon about these high altitude areas where leopard and snow leopard overlap. The relationship between the leopard and other predators, including humans, is critical to its future. The global population of leopards is going down by over 1000 a year and with about 20,000 left across its range it would only take a couple of decades for functional extinction. This has already happened in many places. Areas like the one in the image, where I was recently, a few days walk from a jeep track, are critical for the future of the leopard , an ecosystem engineer, the most versatile, athletic and adaptable of the big cats, yet an animal which suffers so much persecution. In this area, the human population is economically stable so they do not hunt... the message is a loud one, poverty kills everything but poachers are far from the main culprits, that label belongs to dealers and consumers...
@WildTigerNews (www.twitter.com/wildtigernews) climbed over 5200 followers a couple of days ago, thanks to those who care about the real issues (it's not a place for selfies etc). Thanks also to those who have bought images lately, there'll be a send out soon. Every man, woman and dog biscuit has a camera these days, they are all signing their photos and there are millions of images everywhere. This has made it very hard for those of us who try to support projects by selling images, in fact it has become counter productive in that respect. So we have to evolve and it won't be too long before the WildTiger Journal is up and running again. I won't be on Facebook that often as a consequence, I tend to catch news on the run on the tweet anyway, it's faster and cleaner (less selfies). I'll post blogs here at times, I'm very leopard focused at the moment at a time when there's a lot of conflict. Here in South Asia there's on average a human fatality a week and a leopard fatality a day. As I mentioned above, things are at a critical stage.
