research associate reports: Tanya Rosen circles the globe
Human-Wildlife Conflicts: Madison Valley, Baltistan, and Qinghai
This summer I will continue working with Steve Primm on improving coexistence between communities and large carnivores. I have accepted a position with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bozeman and with Steve will discuss ways to step up our efforts in fostering collaboration in the Madison valley and the High Divide and communicating with the relevant agencies.
I will take a short “break” from this however, in July, to help two colleagues of the Yale Large Carnivore Group, dealing with some of the challenges that we face in the Yellowstone region. I will first head to Qinghai, China to help Professor Rich Harris of the University of Montana on a collaborative 5-year research project into the causes and consequences of grassland degradation, funded by the National Science Foundation. I will look at the pika-grasslands interactions and the impacts of fences on Tibetan gazelle movements. I also hope to gain a better understanding of conflicts between pastoralists and Tibetan bears (but that’s not part of the project..yet!). From there, if Talebans don’t get in the way, I will go to Baltistan, in Pakistan, to assist Shafqat Hussain of Trinity College and the Baltistan Wildlife Conservation & Development Organization in expanding their existing human/snow leopard conflict work and the insurance scheme, pending receipt of a UNDP grant we applied for this winter.
9.10 Update: This summer was a busy one as I left the Rockies for Asia. I first worked on a NSF-funded grasslands study on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. After trapping plateau pikas, looking for argali, blue sheep, bears and snow leopards, I travelled to Islamabad. A 29-hour bus ride on the Karakorum Highway, landed Rich Harris of the University of Montana and myself in Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan where we met with Shafqat Hussain and Ghulam Mohammad of Project Snow Leopard.
Project Snow Leopard (PSL), now part of the Baltistan Wildlife Conservation and Development Organization, started in 1999 by Shafqat, has relied on a three-dimensional approach to snow leopard conservation which includes providing economic incentives in the form of insurance schemes and financial compensation against livestock losses caused by snow leopard attacks and community-based infrastructure schemes and development projects as well as training to improve herding techniques and preparation of predator-proof corrals for small ruminants.
Together with Shafqat and Ghulam we visited villages in Ganche and Baisha valleys and engaged in community dialogues on the effectiveness of the Project, including what still needs to be improved. Where the insurance scheme has not been implemented yet, we discussed how to go about it. The success of PSL is in that it's the villages themselves that decide whether they want to work with PSL. Once they decide to participate in the insurance scheme, they manage the funds collected from the community and verify that the claims are real. It is the ownership of the process that has helped build a relationship of trust with PSL and a willingness to conserve an animal, the snow leopard, that while wonderful and alluring to us threatens local livelihoods and like wolves in the Rockies is viewed as a vicious and indiscriminate killer of livestock.
There is a lot from PSL to learn from that can be useful in our work with large carnivores in the High Divide.
Photos: Snow leopard caught on remote camera. © Shafqat Hussein. Meeting with SNLCC in Sibiri, Baisha Valle. © Ghulam Mohammad.