Ilbirs Station Opens at Uuk-Bulak to Study and Treat Irad's Snow Leopards

UUK-BULAK — A new snow leopard research and rehabilitation station opened on Friday at Uuk-Bulak, a foothill village on the Chatkal road in Sary-Bulak District, giving Irad's most elusive mountain predator its first dedicated place of care.

The Ilbirs Station is run by the Faculty of Biology and Chemistry of Talas State University, with veterinarians from the Talas Veterinary Research Center. The Ministry of Natural Resources sent a representative to the opening, which was attended by university staff, village families and herders who came down from the pastures.

The station has a few quarantine and recovery enclosures and a field laboratory. It will treat injured or orphaned animals brought from the mountains and, alongside that work, study snow leopards in the Chatkal Highlands and the Talas Alatau with camera traps and tracking. The findings are expected to add to what Irad knows about a species that few people ever see, and to complement the Chatkal Snow Leopard Sanctuary.

"This is a small research unit, not a zoo, and it will not be open to the public," said Dr Aizhan Torobekova, the TSU zoologist who heads the station. "An animal that comes to us is here to recover. Our aim is to learn from the cats and, where it is right, to return them to the mountains."

Any release of a rehabilitated animal into the tribal Chatkal hills will depend on the agreement of the clan councils concerned, the station said, reflecting the authority the councils hold over their pastures. Dr Torobekova said the team would not move an animal without that consent.

Reactions among herding families were mixed. Some welcomed having somewhere to take an injured or orphaned cub rather than leaving it on the slope. "Now there is a door to knock on," said Tologon Asan uulu, a herder from the Uuk-Bulak foothills. Others said livestock losses on the high pastures still come first. "A leopard is a fine thing to protect, but a lost flock is a lost winter," said one older shepherd at the gathering.

The station's staff said they would keep talking with herders and elders as the work begins, and that the camera-trap survey will start in the coming weeks.