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Snow leopards
The world’s most enigmatic big cats are found high in the Himalayas. Using an array of technological wizardry they’ve been filmed as never before
You’ve got all the ingredients of a cracking TV drama: a menage à trois, a walk-out by a distraught child and – ultimately – the separation of a mother and her daughter which appears like it might last forever. Tissues at the ready then for the Mountains episode of Planet Earth II, as the BBC captures extraordinary footage of four snow leopards in Ladakh in northern India, three of whom – the mother and her two would- be lovers – start throwing punches at one another. The mother’s daughter beats a hasty retreat and she and her parent are reunited briefly before an unbelievably dramatic and heart-tugging ending.
It’s unique footage, not only because it captures snow leopards fighting – and the mother and daughter embracing like any domestic cats might do (top) – but because it brings together four of the creatures in the same place, something never seen on film before. Solitary animals, four snow leopards might normally occupy an area of 40 square miles and rarely actually meet each other. ‘Being a long way apart from other creatures is not uncommon among mountain dwellers,’ says Justin Anderson, producer of this very moving episode. ‘Bears too tend to be pretty sparsely spread throughout their terrain. In fact, just finding such animals in the mountains for a documentary like this was a challenge. So what we saw with the snow leopards was incredible. Having four leopards together has only been witnessed twice in recorded history, and it’s never been filmed before. So this is very special.’
Formed by the movement of tectonic plates, or by volcanoes, mountains cover one-fifth of the Earth’s land surface and provide a unique challenge for the creatures that live there. As altitude increases, the air becomes cooler, the wind stronger, vegetation more sparse and the chances of survival, for any creature, less and less. A growing threat to the snow leopard is climate change. As temperatures rise, so the tree line climbs up the mountain, and because this elusive creature typically hunts between the end of the tree line and the start of the snow line, it has been forced to hunt at higher altitudes than ever before. ‘A trek to 16,000ft on this shoot was not unusual,’ says Justin, who suffered altitude sickness during the pursuit of the so- called ‘ghost cat’, requiring a hasty exit from the mountain. Justin and his team didn’t have to do all the work themselves though. More than 20 camera traps, activated by an animal passing through a laser beam, were set beside mountain passes. As a result, as well as the footage of the four snow leopards, the programme makers recorded the creatures leaving ‘pee-mails’ for each other, urine sprayed on to rocks containing signals and signs for other snow leopards and information such as their age and gender. Again, this behaviour has never been filmed before. A camera trap shone a light on another eye- catching act, this time involving a grizzly bear in Alberta, Canada. Grizzlies, the largest of the brown bears, are some of the most formidable creatures featured in Planet Earth II, with a big male weighing in at up to 700lb. So to see one of them effectively disco- dancing against a tree is quite a sight. ‘He makes Baloo from The Jungle Book look square,’ laughs Mike Gunton, executive producer of the series. The bear was having a scratch after his winter hibernation in a den placed precariously on the side of a mountain, where he’s lived off the fat he’s accumulated during summer and autumn. ‘It’s not entirely clear why they scratch,’ says Justin. ‘It could be to satisfy an itch, leave his scent for other grizzlies in the area or simply to get shot of his winter coat.’
In the Andes of South America, another type of bear, the spectacled bear, risks life and limb to climb nearvertical rock faces in search of an essential part of its diet – snails.
While in the Andes, Justin and his team faced freezing temperatures while filming flamingos living 15,000ft above sea level. ‘You associate flamingos with warmer climes but here they were in temperatures so low that their feet became frozen in the ice on the lake
where they live, trapping them until temperatures rose and the ice thawed,’ says Justin. ‘They’ve clearly become accustomed to these conditions as they are able to stop the flow of blood to their legs and feet, meaning their lower extremities are frozen but the rest of their bodies stay relatively warm.’
The southern viscacha is a rabbit-like rodent that lives in warrens as high as 16,000ft in the mountainous par ts of Argentina, southern Peru, western and central Bolivia, and northern and central Chile.
It sits, Buddha- like, in the morning sun, springing to life and feeding on plants during ‘ the golden hour’ when it has enough energy to move around and the temperature is st i ll cool enough to do so. ‘ If we’d been too pushy they would have run away so we decided the only way to film them was to wait for them to come to us, rather than us to them,’ says Justin. ‘So we sat quietly and curiosity eventually got the better of them and they joined us and fell asleep in front of us!’
Many animals have reason to be fearful of the bobcat, a large North American cat that makes its home
everywhere from Canada down to central Mexico. Its diet includes sheep and goats, but the creature featured in Planet Earth II makes a bit of a fool of himself, diving head first into snow and failing to catch his intended prey in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming, ‘ We followed him for five weeks in temper- atures of -20 º C, and what we liked about him was his never-say-die attitude,’ says Justin. ‘He failed to land his prey several times but he kept on trying, and at one point, having dived head-first into the snow, he just stayed there and refused to come out. He really seemed to want to hide away in shame!’