The surreptitious Snow Leopard

I want you to know that I realize I should be shot for how little I've been updating. Mainly this is because I thought of THE BEST animal to do sometime in May, but now I've forgotten and have been kind of hung up on it and haven't been able to move on. I've moved on though and so without further ado, I present you with the snow leopard, one of my favorite animals in the world.

The snow leopard covers a lot of territory throughout the mountains in Central Asia. It's like span is 15-18 years but it has been known to live up to 20 years. Unlike most big cats the snow leopard is unable to roar and has a proportionately longer tail than any other cat species. For some time it was believed to belong to a genus separate from other large cats but after recent molecular studies it was placed back in the panthera genus.

Leopards tend to leave solitary lives and hunt whenever meat is available. They like to attack their prey from above and can jump as far as 14 meters in pursuit of a ibex, boar, deer, or small mammal. They have a very well defined home range but will not aggressively defend the range if another animals wanders into it.

There are guessed to be between 4,000 and 7,500 snow leopards left although it is hard to say since they are so solitary and hard to track. I once heard of a group of conservationists trying to track snow leopards and going out for 5 hours every day and never seeing a trace of the leopard until they turned around and headed back to camp , only to discover snow leopard tracks on top of their own along their entire path.

The snow leopard can also be found on various countries' currency and city flags particularly in Kazakhstan.