Last post (at least for a while)

November 27, 2012

Four years and four months ago I arrived in Ulaanbaatar for the first time, I came here thinking that I would join an international team of scientists but on the way from the airport to my hotel I was told that it was actually just me who would live in camp. I knew almost nothing about Mongolia, snow leopards, how things worked here or even what a ger looked like. I had heard about scientists who had worked with snow leopards for 20 years without even seeing one, and I was here to capture these cats.

Today I am back in Ulaanbaatar, I have just finished my last field session. It has been an incredible four years with more stories than I can ever tell. We’ve collared 19 different snow leopards, many of them have been captured again and had their collars changed. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have seen snow leopards by now but I will always remember the number of dens that we have found. It is two, both found on the same day.

I think that I have spent about two full years in camp, during this time I have trapped for a little more than 450 nights. I’ve broken an arm, exhausted a knee and bent my nose. The longest period alone was 45 consecutive days, the longest period without a shower was 207 consecutive days. In total I have driven a little more than 16 000 km on a dirt bike. It feels a bit as if I am a new person after all experiences, cultural differences and adventures out here. In a way it is true – my combined weight loss for all trips is almost equal to my total bodyweigh so I guess you could say that at least this is a new body. It sure looks older and more scared.

We have collected more data than any other snow leopard study, now it is time to start analysing it. I hope that our efforts will increase the chances for the snow leopard and their ecosystems to sustain.

I will likely not write on this blog again, at least not for a while.

Thanks for reading my texts and for all the comments, thanks also to all the people who has assisted me out in camp and to the organizations that has supported me with equipment: Klättermusen, Houdini, Flygbasjägarskolan, Hilleberg and Swedteam.

Orjan out.

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Life sucks.

November 23, 2012
Still no sprung snares. We are about to give up, there are only four nights left until we’ll collect the snares. It feels really bad to end 4.5 years of fieldwork with such a failure. But I don’t regret that I chose this area. When I plot the positons from our collared cats there is a ‘hole’ with no cats at all in the area where we are. There are lots of ibex here, we see them almost every day, and the mountains are usually full of snow leopard sign. But not this time. In all the other trap areas there are cats with working collars, we don’t want to trap them so this is the right place to be. If only there had been at least one cat around.
 
We are wrapping up the last data collections now, on the 25th we are leaving camp. Today we were up in the north-western part of the study area. We saw four fresh snow leopard tracks in the snow there. Great that there are still cats in Tost but why aren’t they here?  
 
I have two Swedes with me in camp – Gustaf who is Snow Leopard Trust’s new Assistant Science Director and Johan. Gustaf is superexcited about the place, he is here to see how the fieldwork is done and get an introduction to Mongolia. A long time ago when I did my military service we were paired up two and two. Johan and I was a pair, for about a year we did everythng together and were almost never more than five meters apart. Even though that was a long time ago it feels as yesterday when we work together in field. It is almost as in the old days except that we are not wet, exhausted, carrying around way too heavy backpacks and have no blisters. Living in a ger in the Mongolian winter and doing trap checks is a bit like vacation. Or it would have been if I was still in shape.
 
On the 23rd there’s a camel race close to our Base Camp. These races are quite uncommon and very presigeuos to win, hopefully we will have time to go there and watch the race.

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The eye of the storm

November 8, 2012
This is very strange, nothing at all happens in our trap area. We have not seen a single pugmark in the snow or gravel, scrape or scent mark since we started building snares. I’m starting to think that this will be the first trip that we’ll not get any cats. There is usually a lot of activity in this area, last time I was here we got six captures in a bit more than three weeks.
 
The ibex and argali are rutting now so the big males are occupied with keeping an eye on their females and make sure that no other male comes near them. Guess that means that they have less time to look out for snow leopards. We do find a lot of big males at kill sites this time of year. Since it is rather cold the carcasses stay fresh for a long time and our collared cats often stay on the kills for 8-10 days. Perhaps all the cats are lying still and burping ibex instead of patrolling their home ranges. That could explain the lack of activity in the trap area.
 
Sumbee and six students will arrive today or tomorrow. They are here to conduct a population estimate of the ibex, this is easiest during the rut. I’ll see if I can get them to herd some ibex this way.
 
Not much else to report. Except that I got some debris in my eye while checking trap signals. This happened in winter 2010 too. At that time my girlfriend Marie was here. I was so tired that I fell asleep even though the eye hurt pretty badly. In the morning I didn’t see very much at all. We boiled salt water and tried to rinse the eye without any luck. Sort of gave up and started planning for how to get to a hospital when Miji appeared out of the blue. We gave him a cup of tea and some (dry) bread. Miji saw my futile attempts to rinse the eye and after a while said -“Miji” and then licked round and round with his tounge in the air. Marie claims that I turned white and started rinsing the eye even more ferociously. The only thing I could think of was the bread crumbs and that he doesn’t have any teeth left. In the end I gave up and told Miji to give it a try. He pushed me down on the bed, stuck his tounge in my eye and licked it round and round. Kind of scary but he got the debris out!
 
This summer I was at the optometrist to check my eyesight. She said that I have soem weird scars on my eye and asked what had happend to it. I replied -“An old Mongolian man licked me in the eye”, that was the end of the discussion. 
 
So, when this happened again a few days ago I again tried to rinse the eye. Again without luck. I really didn’t want to get the ‘tounge treatment’, Byron didn’t seem thrilled by the idea either so I guess it would have been off to Miji as a last resort. Scarred of the dentist comes in a new light. In the end we filled a big syringe with water and rinsed the eye, took almost 100 ml of water but finally we got it out!

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First part of the last field session

November 8, 2012
The roadtrip to camp was rather eventful as we ended up in both thick fog and snowfall at the same time. We passed a severe traffic accident outside of UB, don’t think many passengers had survived it. The roads here are dangerous to travel. As we left the roads and started following the roadtracks south the fog got thicker, for a while everything was white – couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the ground began. With no visible tracks I have no idea how Miji found his way, had I been driving we would have ended up in Russia. Still, somehow we reached camp. We spent the first days getting the ger in order and sorting all trapping and capture gear. Once that was done we started hking around in the canyons looking for fresh snow leopard signs. We found hour old tracks from a leopard in a canyon nearby and a reasonable amount of scrapes and scent marks in the area. The trap area does not look super exciting but we should get a couple of cats at least. We finished building snares six days ago and now we have thirteen of them waiting for a cat. Since then not much has happened, we picked up Lasya’s collar day before yesterday. It had dropped on the exact date it was scheduled to, 18 moths after I deployed it. That is German precision for you.
 
The last days we have tried to get the vehicles in working condition. By changing parts between the two ATVs and the two bikes we now have one ATV and one motorbike that works. Miji and I was working on the motorbike for several hours. At a point we had most of the bike in pieces, including the fuel line and carburator. This is a big thing for me, I didn’t even know what a carburator was when I got here four years ago. Miji is good with engines and I have learned quite a bit about the bikes so together we managed to get the carburator to work again. I explained in my Mongolian “this-say-gas-now- (to)this” and so on.
 
Byron, my team mate, had a fever today so I set out for the first kill site searches on my own. The weather is pretty cold, Miji has piled up with a gigantic amount of different kind of fuel for his stove. He says that it will be the coldest winter in a long time. Not sure how he knows but so far he is correct. Anyways, after the first kill site, which was a rather big Argali male that Ariun had killed d killed it started snowing. I got to the second and third but on the way back from that the snow picked up rather dramatically. In the end I coulnd’t see more than 2-300 meters. Navigating your way out of the mountains is sort of dependent upon seeing the mountains, otherwise there is no way of telling where the valleys and passes are. It didn’t worry me too much, until I got back to the bike and it refused to start. I hadn’t fine-tuned the carburator and now it didn’t want to work in the cold. It was about 30 km to camp so no way that I would make it back on foot before it got dark. I was preparing mentally to spend the night in the mountains, wouldn’t be fun but couldn’t get worse than a few frostbites at the most. Though, at last the engine started. I guess Yamaha doesn’t joke when they write that only authorized dealers should work on the carburators… 
 
It’s difficult to ride in snow cause you don’t see the holes and rocks but a couple of hours later, after navigating a dirtbike through snow and snowdrifts I reached camp. Now even my hands have thawed out.
 
Tomorrow we will see if we have to dig the snares out and hopefully soon catch a cat. So far the score is -1 collar (Lasya’s dropped so we have one more in camp now then when we started) so we need to catch one to get back on zero.

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Getting ready

October 19, 2012

Back in UB, preparing for next field session. This will be a short one, only five weeks or so in field. We are heading for the area where we had our first Base Camp. Last time we lived there in spring 2011 we caught four cats. We are hoping to change collars on Lasya and Anu so we can keep following them and their cubs. It will also be interesting to see if Khavar is still around, we found his collar this spring but no cat in it.

This will be my last field session for the PhD. A little strange to think that I have been here for more than four years now and this is the end of it. Well, not really the end – there is a lot of data to analyze and publish. It’s fitting to end the fieldwork in the same place as it started, the old Base Camp or Yamaan uus (the goat water) as the place is called in Mongolian.

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What’s on the menu

June 15, 2012
We have been visiting sites where our collared cats stopped for some time since 2008, those sites are referred to as ‘clusters’. Most often the cats have killed a prey in those sites and with some detective work we can gather a lot of information about the prey, for example which species, age, sex and if the animal was in poor condition. That might sound easy and sometimes it is. Though, in some cases a wolf pack has feasted on the remains together with a bunch of vultures. Then it takes some more effort to find enough parts to figure out what has happened. We also survey the habitat where the prey are found to get a better understanding of where the snow leopards hunt. In other clusters the cats have simply laid down to rest, I have learned that snow leopards prefer to take naps in very, very steep and rugged terrain. Those sites involve a lot of climbing, balancing and telling oneself that vertigo is a highly unrational feeling.
 
Anyways, we have now found more than 200 preys on clusters and can for the first time start looking at new aspects of predation patterns. All previous studies have gathered feaces to determine what the snow leopards have eaten, as in the proportion of different prey species. With our data we can describe how often a snow leopard kill a large prey, if there are differences between males and females, if the cats select different prey species or categories in different seasons and so on. Ultimately, with the prey counts that Sumbee are conducting we can calculate how the cats affect the prey populations and how big a prey population that is needed to sustain the snow leopards in Tost. These results can be extrapolated to other areas. We intent to start analyzing the data in the end of this year.

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No ‘littles’ in the Gobi

May 27, 2012
As we were eating breakfast a couple of days ago it struck me that there are no ‘littles’ here. There is never “a little wind” or “a little hot” or “a little lonely” and so on. Two days before this breakfast it was really hot with a blazing sun. I was wearing a shirt and still sweated heavily. Day after it was so cold that I had to dig out the longjohns and woolen cap again. This morning the wind blew so hard that the ger moved, motorbiking would involve a substantial risk of crashing if caught in a crosswind.
 
For the past 50 days I have had company more or less 24/7. The visitors have been great but it is a little tiring to constantly have people that are dependent on me in camp. Well, the alternative is to be alone here, which I have been for the last three days. Alone means not talk to or see another human being. So not ‘a little’ alone. Totally alone.
 
Since my brother installed the microprocessors our trap surveillance system has worked perfect! Until a few hours after my asistant and Charu left camp, then it broke down… With excellent help from my brother I have isolated the problem, a small amplifier broke. It is a common part found in most stores that sell electronic supplies and it costs a couple of dollars. That’s all sweet and dandy, just there are no electronic stores here. So I get up every third hour and climb the mountian to manually listen to the trap transmitters. How I would love to be just a little tired and a little screwed.

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Not getting fat

May 18, 2012
We packed down the camp, drove about 70 km and set it all up in a day. It is lots of work, mainly for Miji and especially this time because my arm is still preventing me from helping with some of the work. The new trap area is OK but not really great, though all the other areas have collared cats in them and I do not want to capture those so this is the best option. We have built snares in nine sites, can’t find any more good places now. With luck we’ll get a cat or two, we haven’t had any collared cats up here except for Devekh and his collar broke after two months so there is a lot to learn about this place.
 
When I worked in Kenya I felt bad to see that the tourist lodges and many wildlife studies conducted by outsiders were so well equipped and comfortable, compared to the way of life of the local people involved in the projects. I am so happy that this is not the case in LTES. My friend Miji’s Ger, compared to my trapping Ger, shows it all!
 
Late in the evening after the camp move, Ueli and I boiled some pasta and threw a can of tuna into it, along with this meal we had a bottle of lukewarm water. Two candles provided light and in the stove we burned some dead bushes that we had collected outside the ger. We were tired and the low wooden stools don’t provide much comfort or rest for the back.
Meanwhile Miji and Oyuna went back to their Ger in the Base Camp. I can imagine Miji turning on the satellite dish and flat screen TV, may be put a bag of popcorns in the microwave oven, even popped open a cold coke from the fridge.
 
Now I aint complaining, they’ve deserved all of it. Oh, OK I am complaining. Just tired of eating the same canned food for four years. I read somewhere that the two most important features for an adventrurer is to be “fat and cheerful”.  Both are difficult with our diet.

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A new female!

April 25, 2012

We caught a new cat at 04:05 this morning. The snare is just 300 meters from camp so we decided that it would stress the leopard less if we walked rather than taking the ATVs. On our way to the snare Friday joined us. She had been out hunting and now decided that it would be nice with some traveling companions. Our efforts to convince Friday not to follow us were futile and we didn’t want to go back to the ger with her. So the little cat was walking next to me like a well-mannered dog all the way until I put my lights on the snow leopard in the snare. The movie “Gone in 60 seconds” is nothing compared to Friday, she disappeared so fast when she saw the snow leopard that we didn’t even see her leaving.

The leopard is an older female, we guess that she is 7-8 years old but she could be up to 10, very hard to say. She weighed 35.7 kg and has lactated previously but was not lactating now. I am quite sure that we finally caught Agnes!! We first got pictures of her with two tiny cubs in summer 2009, though the cameras were not collected until spring 2010. Same week as I collected the cameras my grandmother passed away so I named the cat after her. Agnes the cat eluded us last time we were here but perhaps we have finally caught her. We’ll look at pictures later to compare.

It is very cold for being late April, we had about 5 degrees below zero plus a bone-freezing wind. When we had finished collaring and gathering samples we applied the hot-water bottles and wrapped the leopard in a windproof blanket and my Mongolian del (robe). She stayed there almost 30 minutes after we gave her the antidote, when she left we made sure that she was walking into a sunny area and that she had got her temperature back. While doing this we found leopard tracks heading for the snare. The distance between the pugmarks was about half of what is normal. Unless she had been stalking her way towards the snare (which seems unlikely) she must have had at least one cub with her.

OK, now it’s tea-time and shortly it will be nap-time.

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Cat #16

April 22, 2012

Mood in camp got instantly better when the siren started and the LED under “Trap alarm” lit up early evening. We rushed to the ATVs and got to the snare about 50 minutes after it had been triggered. I can’t describe the relief when I looked over a hill and saw a snow leopard lying on the other side. It was extremely windy and he had not heard us coming. The cat crawled back against the wall and lied down looking at us. We went up to about ten meters from him and except for his eyes, he didn’t move a whisker. I didn’t want to shoot because the wind was coming from the side and the darts can easily fly more than a meter of course in such strong wind. So I took a few steps toward the cat, when I was about seven meters from him he barred all his teeth in a huge grin, saying “that is close enough”, still lying down. So I backed one step and he calmed down again and went back to just glaring at me. Had to wait for the wind to calm down for a second and then shot. We left the site and when we came back a few minutes later the cat was asleep in the same position.

Except for the wind the collaring was uneventful. It is quite difficult to gather all measurements, collect all samples and monitor vital signs when you have to put rocks on all the equipment to keep it from flying away. The cat is a new male (obviously), he weighed a little more than 44 kg and we think that he is 3-4 years old. It will be interesting to see if he is the new dominant male here. Shonkhor, the old dominant male in this range, died in summer 2011.

Now, we are eagerly waiting for the females. Pretty much the same as a lot of other guys on a Friday evening.

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