Pallas cat is one of the most elusive cats in the world, almost impossible to photograph and study despite being anything but rare in his (gigantic) habitat. Distributed throughout the Central Asia, from the Caucasus to the Iran plateau to Tibet, Hindu Kush and Himalaya, he lives in extreme environments, is active above all at night and has a camouflage fur that allows him to get confused between rocks and bushes.
That’s why the photo you see above, taken by a phototrappola placed by WWF-India, is exceptional: it is the first photographic testimony of the presence of the Pallas cat in the Eastern Himalaya.
Carpet monitoring. The WWF-India project, financed among other things by the British government, has provided for a record-breaking cover of phototrappole in the mountains of the state of the Arunachal Pradesh, in particular in the districts of Western Kameng and Tawang. Here the WWF placed 136 photratraps in 83 different places, covering about 2,000 km2 of mountains, in search not only of the Pallas cat but also of other large felines (and more generally of local fauna: you cannot choose those who pass in front of a phototrappola …).
Strategic photratrappola. The location of the phototrappole took place between July and September 2024, and from that moment the cameras have remained active for eight consecutive months, “surviving” also to extreme altitude and climatic conditions. The results of what was the largest effort of monitoring the local fauna ever made in that region were not long in coming, obviously starting from the photo of the Pallas cat: the image was taken at 4,992 meters above sea level, one of the highest ever recorded for this species.
From poop to cat. The Pallas cat had never been photographed in this part of the Himalayas, even if it is since 2019 that we know that he lives there: at the time, however, only his feces were found, as we told you here. However, these are not the only large feline that was photographed to those altitudes: the phototrappoles documented a leopard at 4,600 meters, a nebulous leopard about the same altitude, and a marbled cat at 4,300 meters.
In addition to the felines, the photo traps have photographed allocates (Strix Nivicolum), squirrels (the stained petourist), and also groups of Brokpa shepherds with their cattle, demonstrating that even these altitudes are humans who manage to survive. The star, however, remains the cat of Pallas, whose area still expands with this discovery: we cannot study it, but we know it is there, and it is always good news.