Lesser spotted: This elusive leopard is somewhat of a 'ghost'

The snow leopard is more closely related to the tiger than to the ‘common’ leopard. But whereas the latter is a highly adaptable species, the ‘ghost’ is a specialist, at home only on the highest mountains

Tashi, one of the two snow leopard housed in the Himalayan Hills habitats at Dublin Zoo.

Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi wanted to study snow leopards, the world’s most secretive wild cats. However, during a two-month search, Peter Matthiesssen, author of The Snow Leopard (1978), had failed to glimpse even one of them. "You will never see a snow leopard," a professor advised Suryawanshi, "you won’t get enough data to write your thesis." But this graduate student would prove him wrong.

That Suryawanshi hails from Maharashtra made his choice of subject particularly challenging. British Raj officials used describe the lowland Indian summer as ‘beastly hot’, whereas snow leopards live high in the Himalaya at -40 degree temperatures. Also, altitude sickness can kill even experienced mountaineers. No, I have not misspelled ‘Himalaya’; it’s a plural noun in Nepalese, without an ‘s’, Suryawanshi tells us in his The Ghost of the Mountains, just published.