Mongolia Wrestles With Wealth of Wildlife : Animals: The country counts snow leopards and desert bears among its natural treasures. Trouble is, their numbers are unknown.

This vast nation of steppes, rich in animal species, is beginning to count its living wealth in order to improve conservation.

Mongolia’s many rare animals include the snow leopard, Gobi Desert bears and wild Bactrian camels. It has equally rare species prized by hunters, like the argali sheep and the ibex.

Officials have set limits for years on the number of each species that can be killed, but seldom knew how many it had to start with.

In the case of the beautiful, predatory snow leopard, the result has been controversy over whether it faces extinction or is becoming too numerous.

The issue is likely to become more acute as Mongolia seeks to build tourism, including hunting safaris, to earn hard currency. About 300 foreign hunters now visit each year and spend about $2 million.

In May, conservation workers began monitoring the Gobi bear, of which only about 40 are believed to survive. This winter, they will study the snow leopard, for which no reliable count exists.

“Not everybody believed you can find bears in the desert,” said Tserendeleg, vice president of the non-governmental Union for the Conservation of Nature and the Environment, which is involved in both projects. Like most Mongolians, he uses only one name.

“That’s why we have to count these bears and find out how they live,” he said. “The most important thing is to do it without disturbing their lives.”

Mongolian conservationists are working with George Schaller, an internationally known field biologist, to monitor the bears with radio collars. They will use the same method for snow leopards.

Schaller, science director of Wildlife Conservation International, a program of the New York Zoological Society, has used the collars on other species. Among them is China’s giant panda, elusive and nocturnal like Mongolia’s bears and snow leopards.

Traveling through Beijing in June after two months in the Gobi, Schaller said his team had trapped, collared and released three Gobi bears.

Tserendeleg said a Mongolian scientist is monitoring the bears’ movements. The information will be used to decide how best to help the animals.

For the last four years, as drought has dried up Gobi oases where the bears used to feed, the conservation union has placed grain in the bears’ living areas as a dietary supplement. This year, the union slaughtered several goats for the bears.

One thing Tserendeleg hopes to learn from the radio collar survey is whether more or different food is needed.

Schaller and Tserendeleg said the Gobi bear is no longer hunted.

The snow leopard is less fortunate. In July, the Communist Party newspaper Unen said an Austrian hunter was permitted to kill a snow leopard after paying $16,000 to Zhuulchin, the government tourist agency.

It was the first official confirmation of snow leopard hunting in Mongolia, although foreign safari companies have advertised such hunting trips for years.

Badam, an inspector for the Nature and Environmental Protection Ministry, insisted that the Austrian hunter was the first to kill a snow leopard for sport in decades. He said the Council of Ministers gave permission in 1989 for three snow leopards to be killed, and the Austrian was the first to do so.

Snow leopards are on international lists of endangered species. They also are found in Nepal and Tibet, neither of which allows them to be hunted.

International listings are not law and Mongolia has a right to set its own policy, Badam said, and “a government decision was given, so it is not a criminal case.”

Goidyn Dembereldorj, chief of international scientific and technical cooperation for the ministry, said letters from foreign animal lovers had denounced Mongolia’s treatment of snow leopards even before the killing.

“But, in fact, the snow leopard is very well protected,” he said. “In some areas, its number has increased and become very dangerous for human beings and domestic animals. The local people ask us to send hunters to kill them. We are thinking how we should handle this.”

Several hundred head of livestock have been reported killed by snow leopards this year, Dembereldorj said.

Mongolians may kill the leopards in self-defense or if they threaten livestock, but are fined 500 to 3,000 tugriks (about $90 to $535) if they kill one for sport. Herders earn an average of 3,340 tugriks a year, about $600.

Neither official could say how many leopards are killed annually for attacking livestock or humans.

A problem central to conservation is not knowing how many snow leopards there are or how endangered the species is.

“Estimates range from 400, which is low, to 4,000, which is certainly much too high,” Schaller said. “The fact is, no one has looked.”