Spot the snow leopard
Can you find the elusive snow leopard in these two images? Turn the page to see where they are
Australian photographer Inger Vandyke (pictured) and British snow leopard expert Mark Beaman have captured the rare animals hunting bharal blue sheep in the Indian Himalayas.
The pair went on a 17-day trek with local guides to find the endangered animals. To take the amazing photos, they battled temperatures that dropped to –25C at night and stayed below 0C during the day.
“Mark and I were out in the field for the duration of 17 days without a shower and in the same clothes that we started in,” Vandyke. said. “On one watch for leopards, one of our Ladakhi friends brought us a litre bottle of water to drink at 1pm. By 2.30pm, in the broad sunlight, that water had completely frozen over.”
Vandyke is believed to be the first woman and the first Australian to photograph a full snow-leopard-hunt sequence.
“Snow leopards camouflage themselves so well in their landscape that they can turn their back on you and literally disappear into their landscape.
“When I look back at my photographs, I often wonder how many we might have walked past in the field and simply didn’t see them,” Vandyke said.
She told GrindTV that without the assistance of locals in Ladakh, she and Beaman would never have been able to see the snow leopards, which simply disappeared from view if you lost sight of them for a split second.
“The Ladakhis are incredible in this way. Some of them spotted snow leopards, then tried to point them out to us and it took us several minutes to train our vision to see them.”
They watched one in particular and noticed that, despite his stealthy skills, he was unable to catch the sheep he was after.
“Seven out of eight snow leopard hunts fail, and we tried desperately to sit and hide so we wouldn’t interrupt his hunt. We wanted him to be successful so he could enjoy some food. That encounter was, and will probably always be, one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had with a wild animal in my life. I was shaking at the end of it.
“Of course, this was partly because I was cold from sitting for hours in the ice while all this transpired, but I was also shaking because I couldn’t believe what we had just witnessed.'’
The leopards are found in 12 countries, and 4000 to 6500 remain in the wild.
Photographer Inger Vandyke, who took the shot above, said, “Even in the ‘camouflaged leopard’ photograph you see in my images, we had followed that leopard so we knew where he was, but each time we took our cameras away from our faces . . . we would try to locate him again to take a photo and it would take us a minute or more to try and find him again.”