The big cats get netizens talking because they are known to be very elusive and hard to spot. Some stunning photographs of snow leopards have gone viral in the past as puzzles because they were camouflaged almost perfectly with the terrain. Some photographers go to extreme lengths to capture stunning pictures of the elusive big cat.
This time, a stunning photograph by Sascha Fonseca has left netizens in awe because it shows the big cat roaring at the camera. The photograph was originally posted by Fonseca on his Instagram account on June 17, 2022. Fonseca said the big cat was reacting to the sound of the camera.
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The picture has gone viral, leaving netizens in awe. Shared on June 18, the picture has gained more than 23,510 likes and several comments. One user wrote, ”That is awesome! What a wild moment captured in an incredible setting.” Another commented, ”Amazing picture! Is that not just one of his scapula protruding at an angle because of the leg positioning?” A third said, ”What a gorgeous creature.” “Should be a nominee for wildlife photograph of the year for sure,” another wrote.
In India, snow leopards are found in the trans-Himalayan landscape of Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Sikkim. As per the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), there are less than 10,000 snow leopards in the world which puts them in the IUCN Red List’s “Vulnerable” category.
In 2019, Prakash Javadekar, the then Union Minister for Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, launched a national-level protocol called the Snow Leopard Population Assessment in India (SPAI) that aimed to estimate the population of snow leopards in India.