An elusive thick-furred feline has been caught on camera for the first time in Nepal because of snow leopard monitoring and protecting.  A camera trap captured images of the fluffy Pallas’s cat in Nepal’s Annapurna region, which is also home to the Snow Leopard and the Himalayan Black Bear.

Pallas’s cats had never been documented in the region before, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).  “This is an exciting and remarkable discovery that proves that the Pallas’s cat exists in the Eastern Himalayas,” Rinjan Shrestha, a conservation scientist with WWF, said in a statement. “This probably indicates a relatively undisturbed habitat, which gives us hope, not only for the Pallas’s cat, but also the snow leopard, Tibetan wolf and other threatened species that inhabit the region.”