A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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snow leopard
The snow leopard is a large pale cat of the high mountains of Central and South Asia, smoke-gray with dark rosettes, with an enormously thick tail it wraps around itself when resting and uses as a counterweight on steep ground. It lives between about 10,000 and 18,000 feet on broken rock and cliff, hunts blue sheep and ibex, and is almost never seen even where it is common.
Etymology
The English name is a straightforward description. Its local names are more numerous and often better: it is the irbis in Russian and the Turkic languages, shan in Ladakhi, and bharal-mar, the killer of blue sheep, in parts of Nepal. The Latin genus name is the same one used for the other big cats.
Notes
It cannot roar. The structure of the throat that allows lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars to roar is not fully developed in this species, so it chuffs, growls, and produces a long wailing call instead. Its tail is nearly as long as its body, and its nasal cavity is enlarged to warm the extremely cold thin air it breathes.