I haven’t quite warmed up yet from last week’s trip to the ice ages and still enjoy seeing cats moving through winter white stuff.
Now, we all know which big cat actually has “snow” in its name:
More information:
But what about “leopard leopards”?
Yes. One leopard routinely prowls through snowy regions, though not always successfully:
More information:
- Russia: Good news from Land of the Leopard National Park! (Not so good news: Their Twitter account hasn’t been updated since early March 2022.)
- China: Info about The Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park
- Cat Specialist Group
About those tigers…
A look at Google Scholar shows that scientists aren’t as confident as the narrator seems to be about the evolutionary reasons for this cat’s amazing coat.
More information:
- Russia: The Siberian Tiger Project
- Good news from China.
- Cat Specialist Group
And then there are lions.
Their range has shrunk so much — although this depends to some extent on how you choose to classify old P. atrox.
There aren’t any videos, AFAIK, of wild lions in the snow. But as this reposted video shows, snow doesn’t bother them at all!
Hyenas at this Denver zoo in 2021 are less than thrilled.
But what if they had to hunt, find mates, bear cubs, etc?
My guess is that lions, as adaptable cats, probably lived quite well in snowy conditions, and they could likely do so again, if needed.
The lively lions in Denver have nothing on these two jaguars in Canada, though:
Out in the wild, I don’t know. According to ISEC, they haven’t been seen above 2,700 meters in the snowy Andes.
It occasionally snows in higher parts of the Sierra Madre, where we recently saw Mexico/US jaguars, but there don’t seem to be any videos yet of wild jaguars in snow.
More information:
Meanwhile, indoors…
Featured image: Tambako the Jaguar, CC BY-ND 2.0.
Flight To Wonder 