The Cat We Barely See, in a Forest

FRANK KRISHNER

We're Quietly Losing

A Facebook alert caught my attention. On August 4, the Himalayan Zoological Park in Gangtok put up a post celebrating International Clouded Leopard Day. Pictures of the resident clouded leopard, a few facts about the species, a line or two about how special it is that Sikkim gets to claim this animal as one of its own. Likes rolled in.

But if you scrolled past that post without asking a harder question, you missed the point of the day entirely.

A cat worth being proud of

First, Sikkimese pride here is earned, not performative. The clouded leopard is the smallest of the world's big cats, built almost like a different animal altogether: oversized canines, a tail nearly as long as its body, and the unnerving ability to climb down a tree trunk headfirst. It's also a ghost. Nocturnal, solitary, and so rarely photographed that a single confirmed sighting counts as a small scientific event.

And Sikkim has had those events. Camera traps caught the species in the Khangchendzonga Biosphere Reserve at altitudes between 2,500 and 3,720 metres — startlingly high for a cat usually associated with lowland forest. More recently, and locally meaningful, researchers recorded it in Upper Dzongu in February 2020, photographed in a farm-based cardamom landscape. Proof that the cat is moving through the working, lived-in land of North Sikkim. Not on some fenced-off reserve on a map. That is the last confirmed local record.  Five years and counting since we've had solid photographic proof the cat is still out there.

Local effort hasn't been absent. The Sikkim Forest Department, WWF, ATREE, the Khangchendzonga Conservation Committee and community partners across the Dzongu landscape have all had a hand in tracking, studying and trying to protect this cat and its habitat.

This year, the 2026 Conservation Action Plan for Caracal, Fishing Cat and Clouded Leopard, was drawn up by the Wildlife Institute of India and formally released in July at the National Board for Wildlife's meeting in Coimbatore.

Sikkim is named as one of the plan's priority landscapes, part of a Northeast-wide, cross-border conservation network stretching into Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. On paper, it's the most serious national commitment the clouded leopard has ever received — camera traps, genetics, environmental DNA, community involvement, the works.

Something Suspicious is on the Prowl

While all of this was being announced with the appropriate fanfare, official government data quietly told a very different story: Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh — the very two states holding the clouded leopard's core Himalayan stronghold — have recorded the sharpest acceleration in forest diversion of any clouded leopard habitat in the country between 2024 and 2026.

Exactly! The same two years the Centre spent building a "landscape-level" conservation plan for this cat, our forests were being diverted — cleared, cut, handed over — faster than anywhere else in its range. A conservation action plan that doesn't reckon with forest governance in the very states losing forest fastest?How’s that?.

Hear me out. Every hectare diverted is habitat corridor broken; is prey- base thinned; is a cardamom farmer in Dzongu more likely to run into a stressed, displaced predator instead of a leopard passing quietly through at night.

Hydropower projects, road-building, "development" diversions — all chip away at exactly the connected forest the CAP says is essential for the species to survive.

Teesta Stage IV: the plan and the paperwork, in the same valley

And nowhere is that contradiction more naked than in Dzongu itself: the exact stretch of North Sikkim where the clouded leopard was last confirmed on camera.

NHPC's 520 MW Teesta Stage IV Hydroelectric Project has been sitting over Upper Dzongu since a memorandum of understanding was first signed in 2008, and the Lepcha community there — through the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) — has been fighting it ever since: challenges at the National Green Tribunal, rejection by elected gram panchayats in Dzongu, and, as recently as July 2026, a four-day protest march from North Sikkim into West Bengal demanding the project be scrapped for good.

The Dzongu community reserve is protected land, set aside for the Lepchas since 1956, and Khangchendzonga National Park itself ( a UNESCO World Heritage Site), sits in the same landscape UNESCO has separately flagged concerns about.

Here's the part worth sitting with: it's the Union environment ministry and NHPC, a central public sector undertaking answering to the BJP-led government at the Centre, that hold the clearance strings on Teesta IV — the same Centre that just unveiled a Conservation Action Plan promising "landscape connectivity" for this very forest.

You don't get to fund a plan about connected corridors with one hand and keep a 520 MW tunnel-and-dam project alive in the middle of that corridor with the other and call it a coherent policy.

Tellingly, even Sikkim's own BJP state unit wrote to Prime Minister Modi in February 2025 asking for a reassessment of the neighbouring Teesta-III clearance after the 2023 glacial lake flood disaster — proof that the doubts here aren't confined to one side of the aisle, just apparently not loud enough at the Centre to change course.

What we can actually do

You and I don’t need to be wildlife biologists to push back on this. We can:

Ask questions publicly when forest diversion proposals come up for projects in North and West Sikkim — attend gram panchayat and public hearing processes where these decisions get cleared.

Report sightings and roadkill of clouded leopards, leopard cats, or civets to the Forest Department instead of just posting them on social media — untracked data is data that never reaches a conservation plan.Hold institutions accountable — including HZP and the Forest Department — to publish what's actually being done under the CAP for Sikkim specifically, not just national totals.

Support Dzongu's community-based conservation efforts rather than treating the valley purely as a trekking or tourism destination.

Follow and support ACT's campaign on Teesta IV — even if we aren’t from Dzongu.The urgent need to scrap the project and protect the last free-flowing stretch of the Teesta has a nation-wide environmental impact.

Celebrating the clouded leopard for one day a year is easy. Protecting the ground beneath its paws for the other 364 is the actual test — and right now, between accelerating forest diversion and a hydropower project still alive in the middle of its last confirmed home range, Sikkim's cat is being failed by paperwork faster than it's being protected by it.