Rare leopards photographed in Afghanistan and Siberia
It was a good week for wildlife and nature, Persian leopard was held for extinct and Siberian snow leopard has been photographed for the very first time.
Wildlife scientists are using more and more so called camera traps to capture images and videos of animals in the wild. Camera trap practice has definitely paid off at numerous of times, when scientists got the shots of animals who they thought were already extinct.
One of such animals is Persian leopard, caught in December by a trap camera in Afghanistan's Central Highlands, leopard was long thought to have disappeared from the region
Persian leopard caught by a trap camera this December
The same week came another surprising news, snow leopards have been photographed by cameras with motion sensors in a remote mountain range of Siberia. The pictures were taken at an altitude of about 4.000 meters at a location called Chikhachyova Ridge in the Altai Republic, a semiautonomous region in southern Russia. There have been signs that the snow leopard exists in the region, there just weren't any visual evidence until now, according to Dr. James P. Gibbs, a conservation biologist with the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) in Syracuse, New York.