Mongolia - In Search of Snow Leopard & Pallas’s Cat

Mongolia, sparsely inhabited by people everywhere outside Ulaanbaatar, is among Asia’s last realms of real wildness. The steppes of the centre and east teem with Mongolian gazelles, long-tailed susliks, Brandt’s voles and tarbagan marmots. The stony plains and mountain valleys of the west are busy with the scurrying feet of Pallas’s pikas, tolai hares and silver mountain voles, and the clipping hooves of Asiatic ibex crossing desolate slopes. Where such populations of wild mammals still occur, inevitably there are predators too.

Wolves hunt the length and breadth of Mongolia, though they are always hard to see. So too do foxes: red fox throughout and the delicate corsac fox largely in the grassy steppes. Across the country, small rodents are harried by wolverine, stoat, weasels (least, mountain and Siberian) and martens (beech and sable); in grassland by the steppe polecat too; and, in the desert, by the exquisite marbled polecat. Plus, of course, there are cats. In the southern deserts and the northern taiga Eurasian lynx and wildcat may be found.

But two cats are synonymous with this great country. Standing as symbols for its rugged western mountains and the shimmering grassland of its eastern steppe, they are the snow leopard and Pallas’s cat. Found across 12 countries in central and south Asia, snow leopards are the epitome of wild. Rarely seen, they inhabit the continent’s bleakest mountains, preying on its nimblest montane ungulates. Pallas’s cat is also an animal of rugged wilderness, but its short legs and flat, scowling face are adaptations for a life spent hunting pikas and susliks in their dusty colonies among the grass.

Following years of research across the country, our Mongolian colleagues have identified sites where snow leopard and Pallas’s cat can be seen, from the comfort of charming traditional ger (yurt) camps. Our snow leopard camp is in Mongolia’s far west, in a valley of the Altai Mountains where golden eagles and lammergeiers are always overhead and the whistles of Pallas’s pikas always to be heard. On the stony plain below our campsite, goitred gazelles drift over dunes and saiga antelope scurry in their funny clockwork way. This is also home to Mongolian ground jays and Pallas’s sandgrouse, while shade falls on the desert from the great wings of cinereous vultures.

In the centre north of Mongolia, not far from Ulaanbaatar but well off the beaten track, we now have a second camp, around which the fierce stare of Pallas’s cat may be seen. The cats are accompanied here by Mongolian gazelles, Siberian roe deer, muscular argali sheep, and by hordes of tarbagan marmots and long-tailed susliks. The sky above is graced by steppe eagle, saker and upland buzzard and in autumn by the rattling call of migrant demoiselle cranes.

At both camps, the gers we use are rented from local herding families, who thus earn from the continued survival of the cats and other wildlife, a conservation model to which we are deeply committed. With sightings of snow leopard and Pallas’s cat highly likely, from comfortable and well provisioned camps (neither at high altitude), there has never been a better way to see these two iconic cats of Asia’s mountains and steppes.

Find out more about our Mongolia's cats tour, or contact a member of our team to book your place.