Snow leopard spotted in China's giant panda national park

CHENGDU -- Images of a snow leopard has been captured by two infrared cameras in the Wenchuan area of the Giant Panda National Park in Southwest China's Sichuan province.

Among three video clips capturing the snow leopard, two footages showed it standing with a backdrop of tall rocks and green grass, and one showed it sticking to the camera in the snow.

"The spotting of a snow leopard was the second after its activity image captured in the Wolong area in the Giant Panda National Park a few years ago," said Chen Fuqiang, a staff member with the Wenchuan station of the national park.

Snow leopards are under China's highest national-level protection and are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They can be spotted in alpine areas in China's southwestern, northwestern and northern regions, including Tibet, Sichuan, Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia.

In 2017, China started piloting the giant panda park. Last year, China officially designated the first group of five national parks, including the Giant Panda National Park.

Covering about 22,000 square km, the park is home to more than 1,300 wild pandas. The park area in Sichuan accounts for 87.7 percent of its total area.

Sichuan has strengthened ecological protection efforts across the park. A total of 460 patrol routes stretching over 2,300 km have been set up. The Park section in Sichuan has more than 1,700 infrared cameras, collecting over 100,000 pieces of monitoring information every year.

In addition to the infrared camera footage of snow leopards, rangers have reported a number of findings of traces of wild snow leopard activities in the park.