The Colorful Unsung Birds Living Alongside Snow Leopards

Our team’s story with the pheasants formally began in 2020. At the time, I was an undergraduate student in India with a meandering set of interests, slowly finding my way towards conservation and ethology. In an effort to move towards this goal, I was welcomed into the High Altitude Program at Nature Conservation Foundation, a partner organisation to Snow Leopard Trust. Like many researchers working in the high Himalayas, the umbrella goal was to understand large mammals and their interactions with the community as a whole – in our case, the snow leopard. To do so, camera traps had been set up across the vast terrain of the trans-Himalayas, quietly recording movement over the span of many years – a pivotal resource to study behavior and conservation of these mammals. However, as we sifted through thousands of images, a pattern started to appear. Between sequences of our snow leopards, there were birds – numerous species that appeared at different times of day, in different group numbers, showcasing fascinating behaviors. 

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These elusive birds fall into a category called “Galliformes”, a group of ground-dwelling birds that are functionally important, owing to their role as reliable seed dispersers and a crucial prey base for the other inhabitants of the Himalayas. Despite their importance, these birds have been historically relatively understudied. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to begin to remedy that! Instead of treating them as incidental, we decided to go back and look again – perhaps this “by-catch” data could tell us something valuable?

Galliformes include pheasants and their allies. In our study area, this included species like Monal (Lophophorus impejanus), Himalayan Snowcock (Tetraogallus himalayensis), Chukar (Alectoris chukar), Koklass (Pucrasia macrolopha) and Cheer pheasants (Catreus wallichii), as well as the Snow Partridge (Lerwa lerwa). These birds are highly ornate, but quite cryptic; owing to their inhabitation on difficult terrain and their sensitivity to disturbance, traditional surveying methods might miss them. Camera traps, however, with their consistent and discreet sampling, do not.

As we looked through and analysed our data, we began to notice crucial characteristics. These birds didn’t occur at random. They seemed to co-occur largely with vegetation cover and temperature seasonality. In places as vast and diverse as the Himalayas, there are pockets of suitable habitat where these birds live and breed. But where do we go from here? 

When we stepped back and examined patterns across species, our conclusions became even clearer. We saw that a high concentration of Galliformes seemed to be clustered in the relatively narrow transition zone between the Greater and Trans-Himalayan regions. The other striking thing to note was this: many key, high-density pheasant areas fall outside the current protected region boundaries in the landscape. These results suggest that our existing strategies, which are often built around charismatic umbrella species, might be overlooking some other functionally important pieces of the ecosystem. This brings us back to our beloved snow leopards. 

Over the past few decades, conservation efforts in the Indian Himalayan region have made significant progress in protecting snow leopards. In fact, over 7000km2 of our study habitat is a part of the Hemis-Spiti priority landscape identified for snow leopard conservation under the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP). And rightly so, these mammals are central to conservation efforts in the region and are interwoven into the culture and lives of the whole community. But the exciting truth is that the same datasets are also reliably recording the broader ecological contexts that the snow leopards fit into. 

Ultimately, in addition to the birds themselves, our work highlights the value of revisiting resources to expand the value of the data we already have. In complex and quickly-changing landscapes like ours, combing through existing datasets and looking at them through a different lens can be an extremely powerful tool. In our efforts to protect snow leopards, it is wonderful to be able to preserve other species as well. By focusing on these birds, we can work towards understanding the biodiversity landscape through a holistic lens, gaining insight into the various players and what they each need to succeed in this system.

Adithi Rao is currently research staff in the Department of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, California. This work is a result of her time with Nature Conservation Foundation, a partner organization of the Snow Leopard Trust, and was performed under the supervision of Dr. Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, led by Dr. Manvi Sharma. 

The full paper can be accessed here.

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Photo credits: NCF-India, Snow Leopard Trust

Acknowledgments: We thank the British Ecological Society, Disney Conservation Fund and the National Geographic Society for partial funding. We thank Cholamandalam Investment and Finance Company Limited for supporting training workshops for camera trapping work. The Himachal Pradesh Forest Department has supported this work, and we thank all the Department officials who helped in this project. A special thanks to the field staff of Nature Conservation Foundation and volunteers from Spiti who assisted in collecting these data. We thank the warm and welcoming community people of Himachal Pradesh for their endless hospitality. We thank Bharti Dharapuram for constructive feedback on the manuscript, which helped improve the manuscript considerably.

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