He climbed the peaks of the Himalayas to catch sight of the "ghost of the mountains". Michel d'Oultremont - Photographer told Brut nature about his journey in search of the iconic snow leopard.
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AnimalsTranscript
00:00I feel like shit because I'm carrying nothing, just my binoculars, we are at 4006m, Tanzin is giving the way,
00:10I have my tripod on my shoulders, the dogs behind me with my camera bag.
00:16Fuck, without them I would be nowhere.
00:30The snow panther is a real ghost, it's an animal that fascinates because it's hard to find,
00:58we don't know it very well, there are very few of them left.
01:00Its camouflage is immobility, it doesn't move, it just waits for time to pass,
01:05or for an ibex or a buck to pass by it to be able to hunt it.
01:08And to spot it, you have to know its paths, its places, its passages,
01:12it often takes the same places, the same crevasses, the same small promontories,
01:17and by knowing these places, you just have to observe for a long time,
01:20with binoculars or long-sightedness, and at some point we find it,
01:23it appears in our field of vision, and that's magical.
01:38My friend Tanzin saw a panther at the bottom of the mountain where we were this morning,
01:45so we're going back down, there's still a long way to go.
01:49There are blue chips not very far from the panther,
01:56and so we're walking along the mountain to try to go fast enough,
02:02but the snow is quite deep, so we have to be careful.
02:49I can't do it, it's so hard.
03:02It lives in a great drought, in the heart of the Himalayas, at a fairly high altitude,
03:07and it's very cold in the winter, from minus 20 to minus 40 degrees,
03:10but in the summer it's quite warm and quite dry,
03:12so it's in very complicated, very specific conditions,
03:16and it's not easy to go where it lives.
03:19The very first time I met it, I was very lucky, it was the first day.
03:22It was the first time on the field, I arrive near a throat,
03:26and I see a female followed by three young,
03:28three young for a panther is quite rare,
03:30and they went on vacation, they went into a cave,
03:34and just this vision of this first snow panther next to it,
03:38it was really fabulous, it was a unique moment and really magical to see.
03:46Snow panther
03:51There is a photo that I appreciated a lot, that I was able to take there,
03:54it's a little snow panther lost in a completely snowy landscape,
03:57so there is a lot of snow, the image is very white,
04:00there is just a trace of buckthorn, and the panther was sleeping in this trace there,
04:04so I arrived there, I saw it sleeping there,
04:07and it got up, it turned around, it took the trace of buckthorn,
04:10and I was able to photograph it like that, it didn't last very long,
04:12more or less a minute before it disappeared behind a cliff,
04:15and during this little minute, I was able to take about fifteen pictures,
04:18which I particularly like.
04:42Snow panther
05:12Snow panther
05:43The images that I hope will serve this protection,
05:46it's an animal that is so emblematic of the wild Himalayas,
05:51and of these great mountains, which are completely fabulous to see,
05:55that without it, without the snow panther that would live in the Himalayas,
05:59the Himalayas would really lose one of its symbols.
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