Written by: Krituka Sapkota - 25005, Grade X
Posted on: 12 December, 2022
Tashi R. Ghale is a native of Manang, situated north of Mount Annapurna, and is famous in the Annapurna region. He continued his education in the Indian hill town of Darjeeling. In the Annapurna region of Manang, Nepal, where he currently manages a trekker lodge called Hotel Mountain Lake and captures pictures of people, mountains, and wildlife, mountains and snow leopards are two of his favorite subjects.
His artwork has appeared in calendars, postcards, novels, travel publications, hiking maps, and brochures. He was a major contributor to the 2004 and 2007 Destination Manang campaigns. Ghale watches snow leopards for Third Pole Conservancy as a citizen scientist, and he has taken numerous photos of the snow leopard. He was the first in Manang, to record camera-trap evidence of Pallas's cats. It turned out to be a Pallas cat that did not have a Nepali name so, researchers gave it the name Tashi Biralo (Tashi is good luck in the Tibetan language and Biralo is a cat in Nepali) which was formerly believed to be extinct in the Himalayas. He declares, "I am honored and fortunate to have a cat named after me.” Peter Simon Pallas, a German scientist, discovered it in Central Asia far back in 1776, which is why it bears his name. His first Snow Leopard encounter occurred on March 19, 2006, and he has since recorded 15 live sightings. Additionally, he took the Manang Valley's rare Himalayan wolves into the camera for the first time in forty years. Ghale is now regarded as a local expert in video trap technology, and sets and maintains camera traps in numerous sites throughout the high-altitude rocky terrain in Manang to monitor a variety of species. Some of his awards and achievements are;
2006: The Himal Association and WWE-Nepal honored the third-place film at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF).
2007: National Forum of PhotoJournalists of Nepal's second place in the press photo contest
2015: Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS), Beijing, 6–8 November: Second place for Best Talk Award for a presentation titled "Diversity and distribution of carnivores in Nyeshang valley." Peking University in China's Beijing Forum. www.beijingforum.org
2016: Trail Camera Video Contest's top five videos for showcasing distinctive animal behavior and high-caliber footage from trailcampro.com. https://www.trailcampro.com/pages/2016-trail-camera-video-contest
Reference:
Tales Beyond The Mountain. Tashi R Ghale.
Nepal8thWonder.Tashi R. Ghale, The guardian of the Snow Leopards in Nepal Himalayas. 1OJune,2020.
