Conserving the world’s roof

It was a chilly February day. Dangwen and his wildlife monitoring team from the village of Yunta patrolled along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. The river was frozen solid, easy for poachers to walk over. That day, they encountered 220 blue sheep, five white-lipped deer, and a line of otter footprints. On the infrared camera traps that they had set up throughout the valley, three snow leopards appeared, a mother and two cubs – and the cubs had grown much bigger than three months before.