Snow leopards are usually solitary. Here's how they drop messages to potential mates.
For a few fleeting weeks each winter, the famously elusive cats emerge from solitude, calling across the mountains in search of a mate.
Sometimes, to find a hot date, you need to scream from the mountaintops, scratch around, and pee on a few rocks. Snow leopards are pros at these techniques.
There are only a few thousand of these gorgeous spotted big cats (Panthera uncia) spread across the mountains of central Asia. Now, the few precious weeks of mating season are underway, and the usually solitary cats must overcome snow, ice, jagged peaks, and rivals to find one another and reproduce. They only have a few chances in their lifetimes to make it happen.
To track each other down, they’ll get down and dirty in valleys, ravines and under rocks, leaving each other messages written in poop, pee, scratches, and scent. The result, if they’re lucky, is a few days of nonstop mating.
With camera traps and tracking collars, here’s what scientists are learning about how snow leopards communicate and choose their mates.
(Himalaya 'ghost cats' are finally coming into view)
Meeting potential mates
During the snow leopard mating season, which stretches from January to March, these animals set out across their territories to find mates.
To make sure they have mating options alike, snow leopards’ expansive territories overlap with other snow leopards. In a 2018 study comparing territories of radio-collared snow leopards in Mongolia pumas, all of the female snow leopards had territories that overlapped with two male leopards, and males also overlapped with two or more females. In a 2025 study, another group showed that populations of snow leopards in Bhutan were skewed female—with an average of two females per male.
Access to multiple mates is a smart strategy. “For the female, there are only positive effects of overlapping with two males,” says Örjan Johannson, an ecologist with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Riddarhyttan and the Snow Leopard Trust who led the 2018 study on these big cats.
This means a female has males to choose from and can pick which suits her best. If one male dies, another male will move into the territory, presenting both a new date—and risk. This new male could kill any cubs the female has because they aren’t his, a problem if the female only has access to one male. If there’ a choice of two, and one dies, the female could shift with her cubs to the other male’s range to keep them out of danger.
Using scent to communicate
Sharing a territory with multiple potential partners results in some common travel routes, along narrow ravines or canyons. That means there’s places to leave a message that other snow leopards will come across.
The message? Smell. “Snow leopards are some of the most prolific scent markers of any of the big cats,” says Rodney Jackson, president and founder of the Snow Leopard Conservancy in San Francisco. In a 2024 paper looking at snow leopards in Pakistan, Jackson and colleagues showed the animals chose areas free of snow where they would first scrape the dirt with their hind paws. Then they rubbed the scent glands by the corners of their mouths over the rocks, leaving as much hair behind as possible and pooping a little. They’ll also poop a little and pee a pungent urine, creating a unique blending of odors. “Those scent marks were detectable to our nose after 35, almost 40 days,” Jackson says.
Snow leopards will also call to let nearby cats know they are about. Lion-like roar this call is not. It’s more like a hoarse person yelling. “It is an eerie sound,” Johannson says. “They go up on mountains and they call for each other.”
Upon hearing those calls, other cats in the territory will head over to check their pee-mail. The scent can tell them if the signaling cat was male or female, if they’ve smelled the cat before, and even if a male is big and dominant. A female will know which male nearby made the mark.
When a dominant male marks the rocks, he is “shall I say, asserting his rights,” Jackson says. “Any other male is going to have to feel fairly powerful to read their marks.” A male going to the mark and adding his own scent could be the start of a power struggle, and snow leopards will attack and kill each other. Smaller, subordinate males might get a faraway whiff and avoid the area entirely—just to be safe.
Some cats will then rescrape and add their own scents. Over time, one set of rocks can become a veritable message board of smell.
“We call them relic sites, because they are probably generational marking areas,” Jackson says.
Scent marking ramps up during mating season, but snow leopards will communicate with smell all year round.
Intense mating rituals
The scent is intense because every mating opportunity is precious. For males, “it’s not until they are maybe four or five years old that they are able to establish a territory,” Johannson says. “Then when they're maybe nine or 10, they get kicked out again.” Meanwhile, after each successful mating, females will spend almost two years raising a litter, skipping a year of mating while she does. The male may have access to females overlapping his territories, but “if he has two females, the maximum is actually six possible matings in his lifetime.”
Once a female chooses her male, the two will get together for up to eight days for a whirlwind romance. The snow leopards lead each other around and roll in each other’s scent. Eventually the mating begins. “Females, they have what is called induced ovulation, so they come into heat because of the mating,” Johannson says.
While scientists have seen snow leopards mate in captivity, pair will mate up to six times per hour, with the male biting on to the back of the female’s neck when he hops on, and each bout lasting around 30 seconds, with lots of yowling. However, researchers aren’t quite sure what happens during the act in the wild. Scientists can spy on a pair for an hour or so, but following large, hormonal cats for five days would be a huge challenge, Johannson says.
The cats remain difficult to track by humans. But when mating season arrives, they’ll find each other. No matter how much pee it takes.
