Original subtitles

High in the mountains of Pakistan lives a cat so elusive that it's rarely been

filmed. Until 2004, when the BBC Planet Earth series showed

the world the first images of a wild snow leopard hunting.

For the men who filmed this shot, It marked the beginning of a love affair

the snow leopard.

I just looked straight into her eyes and she just caught mine. And I think that

was, you know, love at first sight.

Driven by this newfound passion, the two men returned, determined to get to know

this almost mythical beast, this icon of the wilderness.

What they discovered went far deeper than they had ever expected.

To the very heart of the cat battle for survival.

The leopard jumped out. She fell down and fainted.

And the leopard took off.

He's saying that if the leopard comes back, I'll just have to keep it.

This is the first film to go beyond the myth and tell the snow leopard's real

story.

Unlike most people who go in search of endangered animals, Nisar Malik is not a

biologist or a wildlife cameraman.

Nisar is a journalist, and he's gained an intimate knowledge of these mountains

and their people by working here for 20 years with foreign news crews.

Most of the news stories I was covering at that time related to Afghanistan and

the tribal areas of Pakistan, the children of war.

The front line between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance and a lot of the

opium and heroin trade that was taking place at that time.

Nisar is now returning to northern Pakistan for one of the biggest

his life, to build on the tantalising snow leopard material he helped capture

for planet Earth.

This quest has brought him to the mountains of Chitral, part of the giant

Himalayan range that stretches all the way to China.

No one knows how many snow leopards remain here. The cats are so rare and

terrain so challenging that many fear they will become extinct before anyone

finds a way to count them.

In winter, Chitral is cut off from the rest of the world by heavy snowfalls and

rarely visited by outsiders.

Accompanying Nisar is expert cameraman Mark Smith.

Together, they plan to spend at least a year in pursuit of their dream, which

means spending Christmas away from home.

I guess snow leopards is about the only thing that would make you come out. The

thought that maybe just up there there is still a snow leopard and you might

just film it.

So, yeah.

I guess it's the biggest draw you could possibly ever won.

Christmas morning.

And Nisar prepares an unconventional meal.

And rather than just sitting around looking at the snow and the rest of it,

thought I'd have a big, pumping breakfast today.

Has that got testicles in it?

It's got a heart, liver and kidneys.

That's great.

Slightly hungover is not probably the most exciting thing.

The one beans?

No.

So little is known about these isolated valleys that the team's best chance of

sighting a leopard is simply to cover as much ground as possible.

Fresh snowfall covers all animal prints, making tracking difficult, but it does

transform the valley into a fairytale landscape.

As soon as it starts snowing and as soon as it starts looking like this, it just

becomes a completely magical place.

What the team does discover is a haven for wildlife.

Makor are extremely rare mountain goats, but they seem abundant here.

This is an encouraging sign, as Makor are prime leopard prey.

After weeks of searching, there's no sign of the elusive cat, and as the

get heavier, animals start to move down to the lower slope.

The animals are struggling.

We can't get around much.

I think it's time to retreat, get out of here.

They need to find a place.

where a leopard will come to them.

But getting the best location for a stakeout is almost as hard as finding a

leopard.

Nisar's news gathering skills will be needed.

His local contacts may provide a lead.

If you tell the snow leopard that you are king of the jungle, he'll take a

back and let you go too.

As usual, plenty of stories, but nothing helpful.

Finally, they get a tip -off. A snow leopard has been seen coming close to a

nearby village.

I just hope it's there when we get there.

How fast can this car go?

Having spent weeks searching Pakistan's wildest frontiers...

Could the team really succeed in a place so accessible to humans?

For once, there is truth in the rumours.

The snow leopard is not only here, but

out in full view.

It's just the most...

Fabulous, fabulous feeling ever. Right in front of us is one of the most

creatures in the world looking straight at us right now.

Oh, here we go.

Hello.

For years, scientists and filmmakers have tried to get close to the snow

and failed.

But now, here was a snow leopard venturing into our world.

No longer the stuff of myth and legend, but a living, breathing animal.

Day after day, Mark is able to film this consummate mountaineer, a creature

utterly at home on these perilous slopes.

Her markings provide superb camouflage, whilst her giant paws and immense tail

lend balance to some very precarious maneuvers.

A wild snow leopard relaxed in the presence of humans is completely unheard

Why should an animal accustomed to roaming hundreds of miles keep returning

the same spot?

Before Mark and Nisa can find the answer, she disappears.

A few days later, Nisar gets worrying news from the local village.

We've just got a report that a sheep herder out here had about 18 of his

and goat attacked by apparently an old leopard.

And we're just going up to have a chat with them and see if there's any truth

the matter.

Perhaps the chance of an easy meal had lured the female leopard into the heart

of the settlement.

He's saying when you get wounds like this, it's only the leopard that does

And it's got very sharp incisions.

I'm still surprised it's so close to the population.

I thought it must have been while they were grazing up in the mountains.

The herdsmen of Chitral survive on the margins, especially in winter, and can't

afford to lose their livestock for any reason.

But predators also have an urgent need to feed and they make no distinction

between wild and domestic prey.

As animals descend to escape the snows, these conflicts become heightened.

As with many remote places, the notion that isolation has led to a perfectly

preserved wilderness is simply untrue.

The population is expanding, and the boundaries between wild and cultivated

areas have become blurred, increasing the potential for conflict.

When the female reappears, it becomes clear that the proximity of livestock is

not the real reason she's here.

So I was concentrating on getting shots of a snow leopard, and this owl stood by

my side, and he went, there's another one.

And I was going, shut up.

And he said, there's another snow leopard.

I was going, what?

And he'd seen the snow leopard moving inside the cave.

And then suddenly, from that hole, pops out this face.

and you could see it was a juvenile it just had this lost look about it and i i

was in fits i was like jumping up and down and mark was like oh my god oh my

let me frame her let me frame her

The next time Mark and Nisar find them, the young male cub has grown in

confidence and is venturing further from the cave.

He seems to have taken a dislike to the local magpies.

He was learning. Everything he was doing, he was mimicking the mother.

She doesn't like magpies either, but he was looking at them as playful things.

She probably considers them, you know, a nuisance.

There is playtime, and then there are times when a young snow leopard needs to

pay proper attention.

Whenever she went hunting, there was this amazing communication between them

where she'd take a few steps, he'd start following, and then she'd just turn

around and look at him, and he'd just look at her and just slink away and go

back and sit in the cave.

Obviously there was a training going on which was not hands -on. It was, look,

but don't come near me.

A one -year -old cub needs as much food as its mother.

With two mouths to feed, the female is under pressure to kill regularly.

News of an even more brazen attack on local livestock is of great concern to

Nisar.

This is the lady. When she came in, she pushed the door open.

And the minute she did that, the leopard jumped out and pushed her back. She

fell down and fainted.

And the leopard took off. This one's actually been eaten from the back. It's

pretty gory right now.

Nisar knows a killing spree so close to where the mother is hunting is

dangerous.

She'll be blamed even if she's not the culprit.

I'm asking that if he goes up again with his livestock and the leopard comes

back, what is he going to do?

And he's saying that I'll just have to shoot it.

With so much at stake, it's a relief when Mark gets concrete evidence that

mother can provide for her cub from the wild population of Markhor.

Her prey weighs as much as she does and dragging it up a slope as steep as this

must take enormous effort.

It's imperative she gets the carcass back to her den so that her cub can feed

undisturbed by scavengers.

But a single macaw won't feed the pair for long.

Within a couple of days, she'll need to hunt again.

Over the next few weeks, Mark and Nisar spend long periods with the mother and

cub. and start to build a detailed visual record of snow leopard family

By capturing the pair on film, Mark and Nisar have started to bring the snow

leopard from the realm of myth into the land of the living.

Just as the crew are starting to realise how challenging it is for a leopard to

survive in this terrain, filming is cut short by a catastrophe, one that shows

how precarious all life is in these mountains.

I was actually starting to enjoy being here with the crew and seeing the

leopard.

Pakistan had one of its largest earthquakes ever in the mountain areas.

Close to 100 ,000 people died in that.

The suffering and the kind of horror was beyond belief.

We lost a whole generation of children.

I mean, approximately 40 ,000 kids died because this earthquake struck in the

morning and schools had just started.

I mean,

you know, I've got children and I've seen children being pulled out of rubble

and stuff like that and it was horrific.

But it had to be responded to, and people like myself or anyone who had any

expertise had to respond to that calamity.

With his unrivaled knowledge of these remote regions, Nisar is ideally

to lead a team of mountain survival experts and deliver aid directly to

most in need.

Every winter is hard for mountain people, but the earthquake had deprived

of even the basic amenities they needed to survive.

Filming the snow leopard have been a high point of my life.

Responding to people in need, and they are my people. I mean, how could you

ignore that?

Six months later, and the humanitarian disaster has finally begun to ease.

The team returns, hoping to catch up with their snow leopards before the cub

weaned. But it's now summer, and the chances of finding them at this time of

year are not good.

In winter, we've established that it has a certain pattern, and you can sort of

follow that, following the herd.

with

scorching

temperatures in the valleys most animals head back up the slopes in search of

cooler weather and greener pastures what might be an easy journey for the

wildlife requires a major expedition for mark and nissan who will need a much

larger team to support over the eight -week trip ahead.

We'll cross that pasture, go over, and then go straight down.

And then we go behind these peaks and see that bullish -looking thing, that

patch way back there.

That's the final camp.

And if you went a two -day walk from there, you're in Afghanistan.

You can almost sense.

why the snow leopard would be there.

It's got to be really isolated.

No film crew had ventured here before.

One of the main reasons why documentary makers haven't come out and filmed the

snow leopard is because Pakistan has an image abroad, been exploited for all the

wrong reasons.

The easy part.

We're 30, 40 kilometers from the Afghan border.

You know, Al -Qaeda has been there. The Taliban have been there. I've done

stories on those things.

But there is so much more we have to offer the world, and no one's taking the

trouble to find out about that.

We're 150 million people out here, and we're not terrorists. We have some of

most hospitable people out here. We have amazing natural history.

And this is a great opportunity to use the snow leopard as an ambassador to

that there is so much more that we have to offer.

A week into their journey and the terrain was taking its toll.

It humbled us.

It was grueling. It was really difficult.

Everything is so steep.

There's no path.

There's rockfalls.

There's mudflats. I mean, it was really dangerous.

The team are heading for a high -altitude meadow rumoured to be full of

ideal leopard prey.

Nisar establishes a base camp some distance away so as not to disturb the

wildlife.

They're optimistic that a place with such easy pickings will be a magnet for

predators of all kinds.

That sounds like a good marmot field up there. That sounds really good. If

there's a concentration of food for something, you're going to get something

coming in. So let's try that.

OK.

The magnitude of the task ahead is felt by all.

Up here, animals are not used to seeing humans.

Mark will have to conceal himself by building a hide.

Now all he can do is wait.

As the weeks pass, it becomes clear that these meadows are not populated by

thousands of marmots.

In fact, only a handful live here.

And even those don't do much.

There's a marmot on a rock in front of me. It's been there about half an hour.

And in that time, it's moved its head twice and its leg once.

You have to go through so much just to get close to them because they're very,

very nervous.

They're like the insurance salesman.

of the animal world.

You know, they just don't do anything without checking everything out first.

With the rumours of a leopard nirvana appearing greatly exaggerated, Nisar

for any clue he can find.

There's not even a needle in the haystack because we don't even know if

a needle.

The haystack's big.

Two weeks on, and it's clear there are no snow leopards in the area.

Mark's frustration at only having marmots to film is finally beginning to

I hate the marmots.

They're just sort of lazy layabouts, sit around all day in the sun, and

occasionally stand up and alarm loudly.

Usually it might hide, which, as far as I can see, is perfectly all right.

But they don't seem to think so.

The alarm call is so piercing, it physically hurts your ears.

And when they get really fed up, they run down the burrows and they alarm in

burrows. So hopefully they'll be deafening themselves down in the

With nothing to focus snow leopard activity, the difficulty of even seeing

becomes all too apparent.

Now you can see why it is so impossible to see this animal.

Where do you begin?

Where do you begin?

I'd love people to see this image of Pakistan.

It's not made up.

It's real.

Sadly, very few people spend their time trying to project this.

Their eight -week slog comes to an end and proves fruitless.

But Nisar remains philosophical.

We had to go out and see for ourselves because we just had stories and rumours.

and if we just ignored them, you never know what we would have missed.

So we had to go out and see.

And in a way, it was essential to put the story together, to piece everything

together, that it's not necessary that you will see her in that habitat in

summer, but the fact is you have to try so that you have a better understanding.

With the onset of winter, heavy snows threaten.

Mark and Nisa return, desperate to catch up with their female leopard.

The signs are good.

Markor have begun their annual retreat into the valleys and the team think the

leopard will follow.

Reports of an increase in leopard sightings have also brought a team of

scientists to the crowd.

By laying traps higher up at the head of the valley, they hope to catch and

collar a snow leopard as it begins its descent.

But Mark and Nisar's instinct is to target the lower slopes.

It's been a year since they saw the female, and now that her cub is

she will no longer be tied to one area and will be free to follow her prey.

What's more, the makor are entering a busy period in their social calendar,

that will make them far more vulnerable to attack.

It's the start of the mating season.

Competition between males is fierce.

With the biggest males preoccupied, the younger males might have a chance to

sneak off with a female.

All in all, the Markhor are thoroughly distracted.

It's a great opportunity for their snow leopard.

Surely she will come.

Well, I don't know, this time of afternoon, there should be, the Markle

be just starting to come down.

Maybe they'll come down to the river.

Mark!

Leopard!

Leopard!

Quick, quick, get the legs and the bag.

Where is she?

Up there on that rock.

Just sitting up there.

Ah, she's got a collar on.

She's been tagged.

As the snow leopard's study was far from the filming site, Mark and Nisar had

not considered the possibility that their cat would be the first to be

You can see the leopard just up there.

And she's just gone into hunting mode.

And it's blatantly obvious.

It's starting to move now.

Blatantly obvious.

You can see the collar as she moves. I mean, I don't know how she's going to

catch anything.

Because that's so obvious, even to us.

This could be Mark's chance to film a hunt.

But would the collar handicap a predator that relies on camouflage?

Well, the leopard's seen a small group of macaw below her and she's trying to

work out the best way to get to them as far as I can see.

Amazing.

Exactly where we filmed her before.

This is the point where she blows it, which she usually does.

Or she actually makes the kill.

Is this amazing or what? Yeah, it's incredible.

What I really need is...

for you to tell me how close the Markhor are to her.

They're about 50 meters or less, the Markhor is coming running right here.

I'll tell you.

Okay. It's about to go, it's moving.

Yeah. It's moving. Yeah, yeah. It's getting ready. Okay.

It's about 25 meters, 20 meters.

For five of the Markhor coming the same way. Are they moving towards her? Yes.

Not more than 15 meters.

Come closer.

Now that one's right below her. Little ones are coming in.

Now she's five meters, not more.

Here she comes. She's coming up the rise.

She's like three, four meters from her. Here we go.

Oh, God damn you.

She blew it. She blew it.

Oh.

She seemed really close.

Yeah.

She's off again.

Markhor haven't really gone very far. They're just the other side.

There's a stool on there. She's looking at something.

She's definitely looking at something.

There's a markhor just down here between the trees.

This time she's got a better perch.

There she goes.

This is deja vu, my friends.

I mean, like, we've got another marko that's gone in the water.

Wow.

What's going on? This is mad.

Collaring a wild snow leopard is a remarkable breakthrough for science, but

leaves Nisar with mixed feelings.

Seeing her.

It doesn't make me feel good.

Not a good feeling.

I'm ecstatic to see her, but I'm sad to see her this way.

News of the first sighting sensor capture brings the head scientist, Tom

McCarthy, down to the filming site.

He needs to gather information for his study firsthand.

Above that, there's that rock.

All right.

The first time we saw her with a collar, she was just sitting there.

Beautiful backdrop.

His visit is a chance for Nisar to understand why Tom is using such an

method to study his cat.

So this study will give us an unprecedented amount of information on

leopards that we've lacked for a long time.

We try to get a better idea about some of the basic questions like how big is

their home range?

How do they react?

When people enter their habitat, how do they relate to livestock in their

habitat? And these are really basic questions. And the only way to really

them is to use telemetry.

Tom hopes that over the next year, data will be uploaded from the collar to

orbiting satellites so that he can track the cat's movements remotely.

So limited is our knowledge of snow leopards that any data from the collar

be invaluable.

When I see her out here now with a collar on, I see a wild snow leopard

what a wild snow leopard does, but just sharing that information with us so that

we can do a better job of conserving wild snow leopards everywhere.

Only recent developments in satellite technology have made this study

But like many pioneering projects, things don't go exactly to plan.

News arrives that Nisar's leopard has been accidentally recaptured.

A dart containing anaesthetic will be needed to remove her from the snare with

the minimum of harm.

It was a real shock to see her struggling like this.

Even though this was for science, part of me just wanted to set her free.

At close quarters, her presence is bewitching.

One of the most amazing parts of the trapping was the reaction of the locals

towards her.

You can see them gently brushing the snow off her fur, patting her.

The surprise capture is a chance for the locals to see her up close and for

researchers to change her collar for one with a fresh battery.

The cuts are cleaned with antiseptic swabs to lessen the chance of infection

she's kept warm when at her most vulnerable.

Every remaining snow leopard is precious.

There was this mystical creature, a legend, suddenly surrounded by humans

were trying to pin her down and shackle her.

And yet, there's a magic that this beast gives off.

It was strange to see humans trying to tame nature, trying to tame this animal.

After she had been asleep

in the cage for eight hours, the researchers were confident the

worn off.

She seemed to have made a full recovery.

But the recapture had sown fresh doubts in Nisar's mind.

Tom, are you afraid of the risks that are involved?

Does it justify it?

If I didn't feel that it justified what we're doing, I wouldn't do it.

You've become emotionally attached to this animal. As a biologist, I know very

few people in my position that aren't very emotional about the animals that we

have spent our lives trying to protect.

For me to go out there and put a collar on a cat is probably as rough on me as

it is that cat.

I don't do it lightly. I think of nothing but her safety.

And I know that, yes, she's sacrificing a little bit, and she's wearing an ugly

radio collar, and she's going to carry it for a year, maybe two or three years.

But she's doing this for the betterment.

of the species for the betterment of snow leopards here in Pakistan, for the

betterment of snow leopards all the way across the range.

But I know that if we do this, we have a much better chance of saving all of

these cats.

But the project will only be a success if the female behaves naturally,

unhampered by the collar.

If not, the data will be worthless.

A few days later, Mark begins to recognise behaviours in her that he had

prior to the collaring.

About 2 .30 in the afternoon, she went off to a cliff and waited there.

There's no mark or around at all.

And then suddenly you could see a few boulders rolling down and there's one

or was coming down the cliff.

and she heard the boulders and she moved around this cliff and took up this

position slightly higher up and the mark also went down away from her and then

down towards this gully and as she came down the screw slope she did this

rolling thing which she does she'll roll right over on her back like a domestic

cat when she does this rolling you know that she's into a serious hunt and we

don't quite know why it is maybe to kind of mask then to change the color so she

went further down and she got to this point and she was looking down at the

markle and the markle just went over the lip of the gully and As soon as he'd

gone over the lip she charged down the hill really long run And

got to this bush and hidden this bush

I was following her down I got to this point, and because of this black -and

-white viewfinder in the camera, I couldn't really see what was going on.

And in fact, the Markle was just right in the middle of the frame.

I couldn't see it at all.

So I was like, where's she gone, where's she gone? Move the camera. And at that

moment, she's charging out of the bush and took him out, jumped right on top of

him, and they disappeared down to the bottom of this gully.

She had made a successful kill, and so even with this white collar on, you

she was obviously still able to...

to survive.

So that was quite a relief to see she could do that. That was good.

For the longest time, I was really upset.

You know, I just couldn't see the justification of all of this.

But now, having seen her hunt with a collar on, it's almost like she's happy.

She seems okay, and it almost seems worthwhile.

The successful hunt is a turning point for Mark and Nisar.

It becomes clear their photographic record will be more important than they

ever imagined.

The researchers will be able to use these images alongside the data from the

collar.

They're far more informative together than either is alone.

Using this combination of science and film, we're finally starting to

this most enigmatic of creatures.

A window on the life of the snow leopard has finally been opened.

Over the next few weeks, another benefit of the collar becomes clear.

In the past, the team had to rely on instinct or rumours to find the leopard.

Now they can use hard data from the collar.

For the first time, the team can actually follow her.

The information from the researchers leads them back to the local village

Mark films her sleeping next to a fresh kill.

But the camera reveals her prey to be a wild markhor, not a goat.

What is learnt from studying snow leopards now may help to save them in

future. But Nisar knows his leopard faces an immediate risk from the local

villagers.

He decides to visit the herdsmen whose goats were killed last winter.

People like this need the support.

They need to understand that there is a bigger picture.

These people exist day to day. They have nothing.

And as a Pakistani, I can empathize with them, that I can see their dilemma.

You have to take these people into the fold if the snow leopard and the rest of

these animals have to survive here.

By showing the villagers images and explaining the scientific study, Nisar

to make people aware of the value of their feline neighbor.

Actually, this is my enemy.

And then he looked at it again and he said, well, no, actually, that's my

now.

This is their heritage, it's their natural world, it's their natural

out here.

If they're not involved, nothing will work.

We must give ownership of the heritage back to these people.

By filming such remarkable images, Mark and Nisar have begun to lift the veil

from this almost mythical creature.

They set out to tell the story of an individual snow leopard, but in the

achieved far more than that.

Who would have believed during our time here the first snow leopard colouring

project in 20 years?

would not only come to here, but also collar our snow leopard.

The issues involved in that are far more interesting than just trying to take a

pretty picture of a snow leopard. We're all now involved in a much more profound

kind of understanding of the...

conservation issues than when we first came here.

If you want to create awareness, if you want these people to feel that they

belong and the animal belongs to them, they must share in that.

So whether you show it to them in the form of a photograph or on a mobile

or whatever it is, it's essential that that be shared with them.

My wish and hope is that they see the snow leopard for real rather than on a

mobile phone.

That's what all the work should translate into.

That should be something that they look forward to in their future.

Not just this image, but the real thing.

I'm aware of the fact that our snow leopard will be used and exploited,

it's for science or for tourism or to promote Pakistan's image.

But if I'm honest with you, for me personally, she's touched me on a much

personal level.

That's something that demands that I come back and look after her the way

looked after me.