© WWF Russia
As Mergen Markov trekked across Siberia, a
Despite the freezing temperatures, Markov was hot on the animals’ trail. Following their paw prints in the snow, he journeyed high into the rugged mountains, knowing that the big cats tend to roam at soaring elevations.
If all went according to plan, Markov would soon get the perfect shot of his target—with a camera.
It was 2013, and the villager from Russia’s Altai Republic had just been hired by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to help with a project that was giving it trouble. Scientists from the conservation organization had been trying to study snow leopards, a threatened species native to that area, by monitoring the big cats with camera traps. These motion-triggered cameras—which the experts had hidden throughout the countryside—snap pictures whenever an animal passes by. The conservationists hoped that the photos would allow them to keep track of the species in order to protect it from