500 Tenge Altai Snowcock

The Altai snowcock (*Tetraogallus altaicus*) occupies some of the most inaccessible terrain in Central Asia — high-altitude scree slopes along the Altai range where Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China converge. Kazakhstan's early 2000s wildlife coin program was one of the more ambitious numismatic conservation efforts in the post-Soviet space, using collector silver to draw international attention to endemic species with no meaningful protection profile at the time. The snowcock was listed as near-threatened, with population estimates genuinely uncertain due to the difficulty of surveying its habitat.