[Video provided to seeningxia.com]
An infrared camera captured a female snow leopard with her cub in the Helan Mountains, Ningxia Hui autonomous region, in April after the big cat had been reintroduced to the wild.
This marks a new milestone in the global reintroduction project, achieving successful release, pairing, littering, and rearing. This breaks the bottleneck of reintroduced snow leopards finding it hard to reproduce and raise offspring back in the wild.
The cub is the offspring of female snow leopard F2 and male snow leopard M1. It was born in the spring of 2025. This shows how the reintroduced population of the species in this area has acquired the core ability for natural maintenance and growth.
Snow leopards are a national first-class protected wild animal, with the Helan Mountains serving as an important habitat and distribution area for them in China.
Since the restoration and protection of the domestic snow leopard population in 2020, the Helan Mountains National Nature Reserve has introduced eight from other regions.