There exists a variety of Himalayan pheasant that looks uncannily like Donald Trump.

Although they have strong local competition, such as the peacock, they might be the most exotic type of bird on the planet.

They sport an endearing range of haircuts, including this one that wears Trump’s signature blonde toupée, has wings the colour of tanzanite, and a long, polka dot tail feather.

They certainly stand out in this temperate mountain climate.

I’ve come to check out Darjeeling Zoo's Himalayan wildlife and kill some time reading about its conservation and captive‑breeding programs, which are among the most successful in the world.

Darjeeling Zoo's rare Himalayan wildlife

Founded in 1958, Darjeeling Zoo, on the grounds of the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park, was built to specialise in high‑altitude Himalayan species—the animals that would struggle to survive in the heat of India’s lowland zoos.

Perched on top of a ridge above in direct view of the Himalayan range (it shares its grounds with the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute), it’s one of the few zoos in the world designed around mountain wildlife rather than forcing mountain wildlife to adapt to it.

Its steepness is one of its most iconic and beneficial features.

For many of the animal enclosures, there is no need for cages or fencing.

The keepers simply dig a moat around the perimeter of the habitat and, provided the inhabitants cannot jump or fly, job done.

Red pandas, Asiatic brown bears, and many other species live semi-wild lives, marooned in this fashion on isolated hills within the zoo.

A quintessentially Asian sign displays the distribution of red pandas across Asia.

Kawaii little panda faces are stuck in clusters across a very austere-looking map of Central Asia.

The denser the panda face stickers, the more red pandas live in that region.

The zoo is rightfully proud of its red pandas, being the first to reintroduce captive-bred animals into the wild at Singalila National Park.

Pandas aside, the zoo is home to many of the species I saw earlier on my visit, on safari with Cameron.

Only here, they look shabbier and a little bored, as captive animals tend to compared to their wild kin.

The white tiger

We weren’t fortunate enough to see any Royal Bengal Tigers while on safari, but there is a lone one in the zoo.

Pacing listlessly back and forth inside its enclosure, it keeps its flanks pressed up against the fencing.

It’s huge.

Way larger than I imagined them to be, about the size of a family car.

This fellow lacks the usual vivid orange fur we associate with tigers, and is an ashy white colour.

I wonder whether this aberration is natural, or whether it's a consequence of a captive life, like dorsal collapse in orca.

I suspect, without proof, that it might have been selectively bred, perhaps even inbred, with deleterious genetic consequences.

Not by Darjeeling Zoo, which is recognized for its important and successful breeding programs and a member of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums, but by some private owner who later surrendered the animal to the zoo or had it confiscated.

How might this colouration impact its chances of survival in the wild?

Most of a tiger’s natural prey are dichromatic—they see only a mixture of blues and greens, lacking red stimulus cones in their eyes.

Unable to see red, they perceive the enemy tiger’s vivid orange coat as a dull, green–brown.

Hence, the orange coat, broken up by dark stripes, turns out to be the perfect jungle camouflage.

If the pale coat is natural, it must be a very rare mutation that hinders chances of surviving in the wild, so perhaps it has been rescued.

All this is too complicated to bother putting through Google Translate, however, so it remains to me an open mystery.

Snow leopard conservation in Darjeeling

Darjeeling Zoo is arguably most famous for its snow leopard breeding programme and is home to 14 of them—more than any zoo in the world.

It’s a privilege to be able to observe their proportions and behaviour so near to their natural habitat.

Snow leopard safaris are touted to visitors from the moment they begin to do some online research about things to do in northern India.

Good luck—snow leopards are among the rarest big cats on the planet—so I recommend sticking with tiger spotting instead.

Between 4,000–7,000 snow leopards stalk the snowy heights, spread out over a vast territory.

BBC’s Planet Earth team spent over a year in the wild to capture only several minutes of snow leopard footage for their landmark program.

You are much better off travelling here to see them.

But their numbers have been slowly rising, and in 2017, the IUCN Red List reclassified the species from endangered to vulnerable.

The increase in wild snow leopard numbers is due primarily to field conservation aided by increasingly sophisticated monitoring technology.

But captive breeding programs like the one at Darjeeling Zoo support conservation efforts by maintaining a genetically healthy population and researching their reproductive biology, behaviour, and adaptability in captivity.

At the Bengal Natural History Museum

On the grounds of Darjeeling Zoo sits one of the most dreadful museums I have ever visited.

The Bengal Natural History Museum lies behind a portico that’s as Royal-looking as its eponymous tiger.

Walk through it, and you’ll be greeted by a hundred pairs of taxidermied eyes all gazing at you, as if asking “why?”

Their accusing gaze has an uncanny way of following you around the chambers, and it's a wonder no one has sealed the place off out of fear and superstition.

With stout hearts my friends Finn and Cameron, who are here with me, nerve ourselves to walk around the museum, whatever effect it might have on spirits.

The taxidermy—rarely great at preserving the essential features of life—is especially bad.

And any space that could be used to convey factual information about the specimens is taken up with more terrible taxidermy.

A dead deer hangs from its belly in the canopy of a papier-mâché tree like the unfortunate prison guard in The Silence of the Lambs.

The range of taxidermied creatures might be impressive, except that none of them manage to retain any remarkable feature.

Everything is flat, waxy, and bereft of its living essence.

There is no sense or order to the catalogue of the deceased and, thinking on it, “necroseum” would be a far better description of the place.

Unborn tiger foetuses float unexplained in jars of formaldehyde in front of artless models of mountains and forests.

There are enough dead animals and insects to take up two stories.

On the second floor, all there is to learn is that the neophyte taxidermist responsible had, at some stage, acquired the ability (skill is definitely the wrong word) to preserve even larger victims.

The leopards, tigers, and bears all somehow look aware of their awful fate, alive yet diminished, cursed with eternal stasis.

When we step back outside into the sunshine, we feel as if we’ve escaped from Silent Hill.

The long shadow of exploitation

Outside the museum, a cheerless sign describes how Asiatic brown bears were hunted to near extinction due to some supposed medical and spiritual property of their gallbladders.

Picking his moment, Cameron jokes that the current distribution of these bears should be represented by cute little gallbladder stickers slapped onto an austere map of Asia.

Not that us Europeans have the right to be sanctimonious.

We’ve treated many creatures to a similarly violent fate out of a desire to exploit them.

Whales and seals are probably the most famous examples.

Places like the Weddell Sea and Enderby Land are named after 19th-century whalers; geographical memorials to a macabre trade, stamped across the world map more indelibly than stickers.

And with that, it was time for us to return to wandering Darjeeling's confusing lanes.

As we do, I reflect that the strangest thing I saw all day wasn’t the taxidermy or the white tiger, but that Himalayan pheasant with the presidential comb‑over.