Our first volunteer and his first leopard

Almost two weeks since I wrote anything here. What happened, did we party hard after catching Longtail? Nope, alcohol is actually banned in camp (except for the one I use for scientific samples). Power out? We don’t really have power so, nope. The explanation: Our first volunteer, Ashley Spearing arrived to Dalandzadgad when Kim and Namshur took off and he has kept me busy. Ashley is a British guy who has done snow leopard work in India, Nepal and Pakistan, he taught me some new stuff and we have been looking at scrapes, signs and traps for ten days. He left this morning, in three days Nadia will come here (it takes about three days to go to Dalandzadgad and back) and she will stay for two weeks, I think.

 Chappen sent me the blog comments, thanks everyone who has written on the blog, it warms a bit to feel that I am not completely alone out here in the desert, or mountains. To be honest, Friday is lying in my lap, purring, so I don’t feel completely alone.

 With Ashley came some things that Tom had sent from U.S., among them a world band radio. That made me so very happy. I have been cut off from the rest of the world since August 8th; I have no idea of what has happened at all. Like a kid at Christmas I read the manual, inserted the batteries and turned the radio on. Nothing happened… I checked the batteries, no… the manual, no… the radio, no… WTF!

 Ashley had hoped to be able to hear the reports from the Sunday games in Premier League so he also gave the radio a go but no luck. Well, it was packed good, I reckon that it was broken when Tom bought it. Quite disappointing. I figure that the company who sold it doesn’t really care, it’s just a radio. But when one has been cut off for so long it matters quite a lot. It’s the same with showers, back home I could, after a run or being cold, long for a shower and think “that will be so nice”. Well, all you people who never have been really dirty, you do not know what you miss. I had a cleaning day today. I cleaned and checked my equipment, practiced with the blow pipe, washed my clothes and in the end myself. The feeling of being perfectly clean after a long period of the opposite is impossible to describe. Try it! On your own preferably, I don’t think that western culture approves of shower experiments.

 I think that I should clarify something. Two times I have written that I hoped that there wasn’t a leopard in the trap. I reckon that this might sound like somewhat of a contradiction considering I am working quite hard to catch the leopards. The way I see it, I don’t have any moral obligations towards wild animals but as soon as I trap, shoot at them or affect them in any other way, I have a moral obligation towards them. If an animal is caught in one of my traps I am obliged to make sure that it will be there for as short a time as possible (within reason, I can’t check the trap every minute) and that it will be released with a minimum of negative impact. It is much harder to work in the dark and it is very hard to monitor, take all samples and measurements alone. If I was darting free-ranging animals I could just choose to walk away but if something is trapped I have no choice, I must dart it to be able to release it.

 Four days ago we got a mail from Kim saying that Longtail (Bayartai) had been in the same place for two days, if I hadn’t lost all tracks of dates or even what day it is I would have noticed that it was the days just before. Well, I didn’t. We had to re set two traps that had been tripped by foxes before we could go (we have the foxes on pictures), good thing is that there is a stop on the snares so the cable can’t close in enough to hold a fox.

 It was too far to hike considering the hour (about two pm) so we took the motorbike. I have improved my bike skills a lot. The bike has taken a little beating and I have some bruises and sore limbs but we are both working fine. When Ashley jumped up on the bike he asked how long I had been riding. About ten days I replied, out of some reason he held on to me very tight.

 The bike is too weak for two people to ride on it in the long run but we made it fine now. Actually, it is quite weak even for one person going uphill in gravel. With the new tires it works a lot better but it’s a hard work driving it cause I have to use all my arm strength in the gravel to keep the front wheel from sliding away all the time. I will try to figure out a way to get money to buy a dirt bike, if there are any for sale here.  

 We hiked the last two km and climbed a mountain, realized that we were a bit wrong and followed the ridge for a couple of hundred meters. We followed a steep cliff wall and as we were about to go around a corner on the top of the mountain I stopped to check the GPS and Ashley took a few more steps, then he flipped around and threw himself behind me saying “Leopard”. On the other side of the corner, about 4-7 meters away was Bayartai sitting, looking straight at Ashley. Poor Ashley was a bit pale for a while and stayed at the cliff but I couldn’t spot the leopard anywhere, I guess that he hid nearby cause we would have seen him if he tried to get away from us since the only way was downhill and there were few rocks or other obstacles to obstruct the view.

 We have a “wish list” going of things that we want for camp. Examples are dart gun, espresso machine, Indian spices

 Ashley asked if we could add a pair of underwear to the “wish list” (replacement boxers)

 So far everyone who has stayed in J.Tserendeleg Snow Leopard Camp has got to see a snow leopard. Even though the last occasion was a mistake and I hope that it doesn’t happen again I am sure that Ashley got an experience of lifetime.

Second cat on the air

14th of September, we got up at 6:30 to eat breakfast and pack the car. Kim and Namshur left the camp, if not for good then at least for a long while. Since I wasn’t going, I took my time, I was actually at the toilet when I heard Kim screaming “Snow Leopard Alley” as she came running down Signal Mountain (the place where we listen to our transmitters). Well. I’ll be damned, it says on our whiteboard that we were going to catch Longtail on the 13th, on day more or less eh? I know, originally I said the 2nd of September but there’s nothing wrong with a second guess, is there?

 The plan was that the car was going to leave at about 7:00-7:30 but it didn’t seem as any one minded the delay. The trap that had been tripped was Lower Snow Leopard Alley, a really good snare (if Kim or I may say it). We’ve worked hard to improve it. In the same manner as the trap that caught Aztai, it is also situated at the base of a cliff near some scrapes. From the beginning, we built a huge pile of rocks to funnel the cats to the trap but two weeks ago or so, we moved the trap a meter (the hole was a bit too big) and carried maybe 2-300 kg of rocks away from the place. There is no funneling at all (except some very small, thorny bushes to lead the cat right) but on the other hand it looks very natural. We waxed the cable last week and lifted it up a bit, that is we placed small flat rocks under the cable, that way the cat will likely not stand on it. Downside is off course that it is easier for the cat to see the snare.

 You could almost touch the tension in the car as we were driving towards the snare, since it was Kim’s last day she walked the last part to the trap and soon came back with her thumbs up. Oh, man. That felt so great, especially after all these empty snares and false alarms.

 I loaded a dart and we walked up to the cat, I kind of recognized his face pattern (he has two arches above his eyes, hope that there will soon be some pictures on the blog) and was almost sure that it was Longtail. Whoever it was, it was pissed off. The cat had dug out the drag, the transmitter was moved, the trap was several meters away from its previous position and our trap camera was dead. It received a fatal blow during the capture, you can actually see where the canine teeth went in, he really tried to kill the camera.

 If you think of it it’s not very strange, the cat we caught was a 44 kg heavy male. He probably considers himself to be pretty cool and he is in the middle of his home range (we think). As he strolls up Snow Leopard Alley, he suddenly feels the smell of another cats poop on his scrape! What the … (Longtail can’t know that it was we who placed that juicy scat on the scrape). So he walks up, sniffs the scat and as just as he is getting in position to erase this ordeal his paw gets caught, he gets pebbles thrown in his face and as he tries to run away he realizes that he is caught. But that’s not all. The bastards who did this to him didn’t stop there. No, they put a camera at the trap to take pictures of him in his humiliation and since it is dark that camera uses a red “flash” for the Infra red pictures.

 Even if the pictures are of lousy quality we can actually see the nose in one picture and in the next; the canines when Longtail decides that the “flashing” thing must die! 

As we approached him it became obvious that he was still upset about the trapping incident. He tried all his snow leopard tricks to intimidate me; he showed me his teeth, he hissed at me, he even tried to look big. Nothing helped though, seconds later he had a dart in his thigh.

 The capture went smoothly and we got all the samples. Thank you Jonas and USDA, we collected blood in 10 filter paper strips and placed them in clothes pinches? (kladnypor in Swedish) to dry. Midgi decided that the cat should be named Bayartai (pronounced Bayr’te) which means “Good bye” and also “everybody happy”. I’m glad that Kim and Namshur were around to catch this cat cause he has fooled us a few times. Oh, he wore his previous name with honor, Longtail’s tail was 1.8 cm longer than Aztai’s…

 At about noon they all left the camp. Midgi is driving and Oyuna came along. She has been complaining about a bad tooth ache for a while and on the 13th she asked if I could give her some of the drugs we use for the snow leopards and pull the tooth…

 I don’t want to be rude but I’m not too keen on killing the cook either so I said no. Though I offered her to go to Dalandzadgad with the crew to visit a dentist instead and she took the offer. Remember what I wrote about herder mentality and planning, she was in Dalandzadgad a week ago but did she see the dentist? I shouldn’t be too hard though, I think that dentist and black smith is the same thing out here and there is probably not much hope of getting any other pain relief than Vodka. I would hesitate to go to the dentist too under these conditions. Speaking of dentists, I was at one in Sweden in June to make sure that my teeth were fine before I left. I have a tooth that’s been hurting once in a while and I was a bit scared that it would give me problems. The dentist asked me to say how much it hurt on a scale from 1 to 10. This must be a universal scale cause the ambulance personnel asked the same question about my knee in Canada. I don’t want to claim that I’m a tough guy in any way (on the contrary rather, see below) but I reckon that if 10 is the highest value there is; that must mean that you pass out after 10. So I answered that my knee was four to five and my tooth was maybe 1.5. The dentist took some X-rays and said that I needed a root canal. Later the nurse asked about pain relief and dentist answered “no need, it’s dead”. That’s strange I thought, I’ve always heard that root canals are kind of painful. Well, she was 50% correct, one of the nerves was dead, the other one was fine. I wasn’t fine when she drilled into the nerve though. Would actually place that sensation at about 6, or maybe even 7 on the scale. Somehow the dentist thought that it was my fault cause I hadn’t told her how much it hurt… Well Mrs Dentist, it hurts now. Is that normal shouldn’t the tooth be dead if you do a root canal? What have you done with my tooth? I don’t dare going to the blacksmith, as I wrote I am way to Knapsu (explanation of Knapsu will follow) for that.  

 When I’m writing about the not-so-wise and at the same time somewhat painful parts of me I might as well tell you the foot story. It’s a bit embarrassing but the foot is fine now so I figure that I can share it.

The last week in Sweden was very hectic; two days before I left I decided to wash my winter sleeping bag. There is a good washing machine and tumbler? (Machine where you tumble dry things) at Grimso wildlife research station where I used to work. I brought the sleeping bag, threw it in the washing machine and did some computer work, came out and realized that the tumbler was broken. You must tumble dry the bag to get the filling evened out through the bag… I called all my friends until I found a person Jenny, with a tumbler. She brought the bag and tried to tumble it at her apartment but she could only set the machine at hot or cold, she was afraid that hot would be too warm so she chose cold.  The day after she dropped by with the bag, it was still damp so I left it outside (in the warm and nice weather) to dry and went to the station to do some computer work. Couple of hours later Gustav says “wow, I think that we will have some rain”. I looked out, saw nothing but black clouds, threw myself in the car and almost made it. The rain started pouring down when I had one km left, as I ran to the sleeping bag I saw a pool of water on it. I had had too much to do for a couple of days and didn’t need that. In pure frustration I kicked out, hit the stairs and felt what I would describe as maybe a three or four on the scale spreading in my right foot. Great, how am I to explain this to Tom? It’s not possible, better to tie the boot hard and try not to limp when there were people from the project around. The foot doesn’t hurt anymore, maybe 0.2 on the scale but that doesn’t count.

It was Chris who introduced Knapsu to the camp. If you read the book “Rock’n roll in Vittula” by Mika Niemi you will find a very good explanation of the word. Vittula is a part of Pajala, a village in the northernmost of Sweden, close to Finland. I hope this is correct cause my good friend Marie comes from Pajala and she will be very upset if I get this wrong. Many of the people up there speaks both Finnish and Swedish, Knapsu is Finnish and means “unmanly”. Typical examples of knapsu are: doing the dishes, pushing the child-trolley…

We have tried to come up with some rules of what is knapsu in camp. Chris thinks that screaming in the shower cause the water is cold is knapsu, I would rather say that heating the water up before using it in the shower is knapsu. Though that means that I am knapsu cause cold water is not a friend of mine…The day Kim and I set the trap we caught Bayartai in she brought a tin can of sprouts for lunch. I have never had sprouts before. Sprouts are small fishes (we call them agnsill in Swedish and use them as bait to catch for example mackerel). Kim claimed that it was very knapsu not to eat the heads… I claim that the people here have misunderstood the whole concept. You are not supposed to eat the bait but rather the thing that eats the bait. God damn it.

 Being afraid of the dark is very knapsu. I am not afraid of the dark. But when it is dark I am a little afraid of the things that I can’t see cause it’s dark…

Last night I had a transmitter tripped. I kind of hoped that it wouldn’t be a snow leopard cause I was all alone and things are always harder when it’s dark. We have a full moon here and since there are no trees it is very bright in the nights. As I’m walking to the trap I start thinking of all stories about wolves with rabies that get shot in the villages and that I am walking right under cliffs that would be great for a stalking snow leopard. Then I notice that my headlamp is about to die. I have another one in my backpack but it’s kind of neat to walk in the moon light. And I’m not afraid of the dark; I don’t need light. So I’m telling myself.

 Half of you are probably laughing at me now, but as I wrote, I’m not a tough guy. The interesting thing is that I have walked the same way many times in daylight, often with my MP3 player. I would probably be an easier prey for a rabid wolf but I feel secure even though I can’t hear anything, strange? Same thing happened in Kenya when I lived in a tent with some Massai. As long as my friend Ulf was around things were fine but when he got sick and left I woke up a couple of times cause a leopard snarled nearby or some lions roared as they passed by and that was scary. When a leopard circled my tent, snarling I held my knife tight and swore that I would move the tent closer to the fireplace at first light. But as light came, I felt secure again and left the tent where it was. Strange?

 I don’t know. But I know that it wasn’t knapsu. Stupid maybe but not knapsu.

What could have been a very bad day

A couple of days ago Tom wrote us a mail with, what seemed like, pretty bad news: The collar that we had just put on Aztai hadn’t moved for six days. There could actually only be three possible explanations; either Aztai was dead (which would off course be the worst scenario), the collar had dropped off or Aztai had stayed at the site for six days, suggesting that he had a big kill there.

Well, six days without moving (actually, the positions were scattered within about 100 x 100 m but the positions we get are not perfect and that could be within the margin of error for the GPS) is quite a long time, Aztai seemed fine when we left him so the most likely explanation was a collar failure.

Kim knows a researcher that put the same type of collars on bears earlier this summer and they dropped off in advance.

Some short collar info: on one side of the collar, there is a small box with a tiny charge and a timer. Before you deploy the collar you can set a date when you want the charge to explode which will open the collar and make it drop off from the animal (hence the box is named “drop off”). There are also versions o fdrop offs that you can trigger via sms or VHF signals but they are not very reliable.

Anyways, our collars look a bit like “Hey, come and help! But no help arrived…” (a bit of Swenglish but I think you get the picture) so we were pretty sure that the collar had failed. I set out on a hike together with Namshur and during the hours it took us to hike to the site I had plenty of time to think up curses and letters to the Engineers at the collar company. I don’t know how many times collars have broken down on projects that I’ve been working at. The strange thing is that the engineers are so crappy at building them and that when they brake down, they think that it’s ok to just send a new one. Most wild animals require quite a lot of hard work to capture and snow leopards are not an exception but this seems hard for the collar companies to understand.

After five letter and three curses we arrived at the site and started searching. As we descended a hill my nose picked up a familiar scent. I have spent all too many days searching kill sites not to recognize the smell of a carcass and in a way that would have made my old dog proud I tracked it down. So, was it Aztai?

Nope, it was the biggest freaking Ibex that I’ve seen. According to the horns it was 12 years old (you can age them by the horns! No more braking knife blades in TV when trying to get the lower mandible out). There was nothing left but the head and some bones, and a lot of cat poop. Aztai was a bit skinny when we caught him but after that meal he must have gained a lot. Actually, three of our trap cameras photographed him about five days later and he looks fat and healthy.

So besides the really good news that our cat is alive and kicking we were also able to conduct the very first GPS cluster search (kill site search) on snow leopards. And collect the first information for the predation study!

We have now had six traps released without catching anything. Feels like shit. After our last failure, Kim and I made a thorough field-test of the last released trap. The problem is that the snare cable does not close down enough. So we set the trap totally camouflaged, with a little camo and without camo and released it to test if the camo affected it. It seems as it doesn’t really but rather the problem is that the metal part that slides along the cable and is supposed to lock tight isn’t made of stainless-steel. The locks are quite corroded and don’t slide to well any more. We’ve been e-mailing back and forth with Tom and he has asked some cat-trappers for advice. Last days we’ve been cleaning our traps and waxed the cables with a candle so now the locks slides like “Bambi on ice”. Or something, don’t know any good expressions in English.

We’ve actually done one more thing… You could say that the gloves are off now. No more Mr Nice Researcher and so on. We collected a lot of cat poop from Aztai’s kill site and have deployed it at many of the traps (it’s not fun to carry fresh cat poop in paper bags for kilometers and kilometers but as I wrote, the gloves are off. Not literally that is, we had gloves on when we collected the poop). So now we are waiting. If Longtail keeps his/her schedule, then he/she should drop by any day now…

Kim, Namshur and Midgi leaves early the 14^th an I bet that I will catch the next cat during the days when Midgi is away…

Some thoughts and reflections about life in Mongolia

Its warm again. Which is nice, and what makes it even nicer is that it’s not super-hot. Neither the car nor the cook has arrived yet. Kim has worked in Mongolia before so she is not as naive as I am but both of us have learned a few new things about the herder-mentality.

1. As long as there is a tiny bit of something left, you do not need to get more. For example, if a car is going to town (which takes about 1 hour one-way) and there is one slice of bread left, we do not need to buy bread. However, when the car comes back and someone has eaten the slice we are in desperate need of bread and must immediately go and buy more. The same applies to water, vegetables etc. As long as you have some left, there is no need to replenish the supplies. Since many things can only be found in UB or Dalandzadgad this view of life is a bit frustrating. (though, his was not new for Kim).

2. “this water is not so good for drinking, smells a bit bad, good for shower or cleaning” might mean that the water smells a bit because it has been sitting in the jerry can for too long. But it might also mean “someone put gasoline in that can, better not drink the water”. I was a bit surprised when i noticed that the result of my latest shower was not that my body was immensely clean and smelled like roses; rather I had a lingering odor of gasoline around me.

3. 11 days ago Oyuna, our cook, asked if she could have five days off to accompany her daughter to Dalandzadgad. That seemed reasonable and off they went. We haven’t seen her since and are now quite sure that when the locals say, ” I will be back in five days”, it means “I will definitely be gone for five days and god knows when I’ll be back”. It’s not that they are running away from work or so, it’s just that no one knows when there will be a car coming here, or if that car will break down or not… For the last week we have asked Namshur and Midgi when Oyuna will return. The only answer is “maybe tomorrow”.

4. We have been cooking our own food and since neither Kim nor I are too keen on dried sheep meat, we’ve had lots of vegetarian food, pasta sauces and tuna. We are happy but Namshur complains that his stomach gets very acidic from too much bread, vegetables and pasta and that he needs sheep meat. Kind of fun.  I’ve never heard that meat will help against acidic stomachs. On one of the rainy days, Kim made tortillas that we stuffed with beans, rice, sheep and chili sauce. Best sheep burritos in all of Asia I think. That day we also learned how to tenderize your dried sheep meat. You simply choose a piece that catches your delight, put it on a big flat stone (the stone has been sitting on the kitchen floor since we came but we haven’t really paid attention to it before) and beat the crap out of the sheep with a hammer. Kim and I are both eagerly waiting for this to be shown on TV on a cooking show “and now, it is time to beat the sheep…”

5. The standard answer to many questions is “no problem”. Kim and I can’t really agree on what exactly this means. I think that the locals simply leave out the words “life threatening” in between so what they really say is “no life threatening problem” while Kim thinks that “no problem” means something in between “hopefully” and “in your dreams, sucker”.

6. Namshur and Pujii are both very good in English and sometimes we forget that they might not understand what we are saying. This is further enhanced since all of them want to please and help so they pretend to understand. Yesterday I taught Namshur how to use the GPS so he could go and collect a trap camera and bring it back to camp. We practiced with the GPS in camp. I showed him how to store a position, find a stored one and how to set the GPS to show you distance and bearing to the position you want to go to. Namshur practiced for a while and said that he understood and was ready to go. Good I said, so do you know approximately where the camera is? What camera he replied. ” The camera you are going to collect”.
“Oh, am I to collect a camera?”…

So what has happened since last… Not much.
I was wrong about catching a cat on the 2nd of September, too bad, we almost caught one though. A week ago the trap camera in Lower Camp Canyon (I will start writing the place names cause Kim has promised to send a map to Chappen as soon as she gets home) photographed a snow leopard at a trap site. He was standing looking at the big pile of rocks that were stashed between him and the scrape that he wanted to get to. Short explanation: everything takes place at the foot of a cliff wall, the trap is set close too the wall cause snow leopards like to walk along walls (according to Tom and the pictures we’ve taken agree with him), on the other side of the trap we buried a big piece of scrap metal that the snare is attached to and on top of the metal there is a pile of rocks. The idea is that the leopard will walk between the rock pile and the cliff and that the rocks will funnel him into the snare. In theory this holds. It’s just that our spotted friend didn’t agree; he thought that the rock pile looked a bit suspicious so instead of walking between the rocks and the wall, he climbed the rocks and took a pee at the scrape.

A few bad Swedish words could be heard quite far from the camp when we looked at the pictures from the camera…

We had some mail contact with Tom and Chris about the funneling and rock-pile-building. I think that Aztai was the 14th snow leopard ever to be collared and so there is very little knowledge of how to trap them. As I have written previously, Tom really knows what he is doing and I have learned a lot from him.  But, even though he is the one who has caught the most snow leopards, it’s still just six individuals. Naturally, the trapping is based on trial and error and Kim and I have the huge benefit of having cameras at the trap sites so we can actually see what the cats are doing, what scares them and even where they place their feet. The concerned trap was one of the first we set and in the beginning, everyone really wanted to help, and we might have gotten a bit carried away in the rock-pile building…

Anyways, shame on the ones who give up. We went to the trap, threw away all rocks, moved the trap and the metal piece and opened up the area so it wouldn’t look as suspicious.

As we have hiked around and checked and fixed the traps after the rain, we have taken away lots of rocks. In some cases I have replaced them with small thorny bushes, hoping that these will not look as threatening but still do the job of funneling the cat towards the trap.

A couple of days later we downloaded the pics from the Lower camp canyon camera and you can probably imagine that the bad Swedish words that came out of my mouth this time were even worse and could be heard even longer cause on the pictures there was a new cat standing on top of our trap. He has one foot on each side of the %#@#$& trap, looked into the camera for a while, then walked to the scrape, turned toward the camera and really took his time relieving himself…
We looked at the pictures at 5 in the evening and before nightfall, I had pulled a trap that wasn’t in a great location anyway, hiked to Lower Camp Canyon and set a second trap. This one is set so that if anything with spots and a long tail as much as thinks about taking a pee at my scrape, he will for sure end up with an orange dart in his buttocks.

Oh, got to write one last thing. A couple of days ago as I was sitting on my bed changing to my boots I noticed that something was moving in Kim’s bed. Kind of odd I thought and took a closer look. Sure enough there was a snake crawling around in the bed. I called Kim but the snake didn’t seem to appreciate the commotion so it tried to hide in the sleeping bag… Namshur claimed that it wasn’t toxic, grabbed it by the tail and carried it out (that ought to keep mom from visiting the camp…)