How to get rid of tiredness and never ever trust that spring is coming

Two days ago Bo and I went with Miji to visit a family whose livestock had been raided by a snow leopard female with two cubs. The leopards had killed goats for three nights in a row in late February. All the tiredness that I wrote about last time disappeared when I heard this, the first sign of a female with cubs!!

Yesterday we checked our trap cameras, I got a little tired again when we discovered that we had three visits by Aztai but nothing else. We have decided to pull the traps from the current trap area to avoid catching Tsagaan again in the near future. This means that it will take a while before I can report on any new capture. I would like to get more collars out fast but it has to be done in an ethically correct way that we can defend for ourselves and others. In the end of the day it is better to have two collared cats and be proud of the captures than four collared cats and ashamed of what we did to collar them. 

Bo left with Miji to Dalandzadgad this morning. I wasn’t sure of what to do today but after a while I got too eager to check the area where the female with cubs are so I packed my bag and took off. We have had ten warm days with lots of sightings of migrating birds and insects. This morning was sunny and warm and I behaved like an amateur and drove on dirt tracks to a place 30 km away (as the bird flies) without proper equipment. When I was about two km from the mountain range I noticed that I couldn’t see them anymore. Couple of minutes later I was in the middle of a snow storm and couldn’t see much at all anymore. I always carry tools to repair the bike, water, some food, matches (don’t know what to build a fire of in the desert but still), a headlamp, and a thin down jacket in the backpack. What I didn’t bring was my gauntlets (big mittens with a windproof layer on the outside). My hands are my weak point when it’s cold. It didn’t take long for my gloves to get wet or for my hands to go numb. I turned towards base camp, there is a “road” going there and it is closer than our trap camp. 

Now, to make matters worse, the only maps we have are A4 printouts with contours of the topography. Each line represents a 10 meters difference in altitude so they are not very accurate. The mountains contain a lot of iron ore why our compasses don’t work too good. I usually navigate with the sun and my watch (which is fine, when you see the sun…) I do have a GPS but since our maps don’t have gridlines, I can only use it to find stored positions. 

I checked the GPS every time I stopped to get some blood back into my hands to be sure I was going in the right direction and eventually I got to Base Camp. To my disappointment, no one was there and I didn’t carry the keys to our ger. Well, nothing to do but drive to the trap camp, in the end I just hung on to the bike without shifting or changing the throttle much. My neighbor was herding livestock just by our camp when I got there and I invited him in to thaw out over a cup of tea. 

Tomorrow, I will pack more clothes and find that female…

New pictures from the field

Several pictures from the field camp have now been added.

Visit Örjan Johansson’s photostream on flickr.

Tsagaan re-collared

We caught and re-collared Tsagaan a couple of days ago. It feels really, really great! 

The first dart that I shot bounced out and since he didn’t show any signs of being affected by the drugs after five minutes, I shot another one. We changed his collar, put him in the sleeping bag and gave him the antidote. I think that he got some drugs from the first dart too because he didn’t wake up. I could see him breathing through the sleeping bag so we were not worried (besides, his heart rate and temperature were good before we moved away). After about 30 minutes he raised his head and gave up a BIG yawn, then he laid down again. I had arranged the sleeping bag so he had a pillow and I regretted this now. We waited for maybe ten more minutes and then decided to walk up to him, when he heard the footsteps in the gravel he sat up and looked at us with an expression on his face saying “how the **** did you guys get here without me noticing”? Then he took off, seemingly quite un-affected by the drugs… 

It is good that the cats stay in the sleeping bag and keep warm until they have recovered but I never thought that they would like it so much that they would take naps in it… The day after we closed or traps to evaluate the situation and see if he decides to leave the area. If not, I will likely collect the traps and start preparing to change area. The cameras have only been out for a week and we have a lot of hiking and motor biking to do before we can be sure that we have found the best trap sites. If we collect the traps there will be a break in the trapping. I would like to catch two cats in each area given the amount of work that is involved in the scouting and trap-building but one has to accept that animals do not always do as you would like them to. For example only step in snares when they are un-collared or wearing collars that needs to be changed… But then, it would be very good if they did step in the snares.

I lost all my energy as soon as we closed the traps, just sat in front of the fire with a blank expression. As long as one has to keep going I can withhold diseases, injuries and tiredness but as soon as I relax, it all comes tumbling down on me. Not that I am sick or injured, just a little tired. But it will be fine in a couple of days.

Bo was obviously excited to see the snow leopard but he is a birder and when we saw a Hume’s ground jay he almost fell of the motorbike. I could tell from his face that it was something special, apparently it is a very rare bird that has been hard to classify. For a while people thought that it as a woodpecker, than a jay and now I think that it is a chickadee. I have seen the bird quite a few times but never paid it much attention, I can tell that it’s not a duck but no more than that…

Spring has finally arrived. We have seen some migrating birds and a few insects. Feels great, even though the nights are still pretty cold.

Snow tracks, researchers and storms

I found a really fresh (3-6 hours) snow leopard track in the snow two weeks ago and just had to go get Jenny and Geir to show them. It’s a bit funny, don’t know if it is us Northmen (and women), the hunter instinct or if I am just old-school but I get really, really excited over a snow track. I try to gather as much information about the animal as possible, try to learn why it walks where it does, where it’s heading, try to understand why it makes the choices it do. Strange in a way, I mean we have trap cameras. GPS collars, DNA, the whole lot of advanced technologies. But still, there is something special with a snow track… 

And to be honest, if you want to trap a species, you can learn a lot by tracking it, especially if you try to picture what the animals have done and why.

The morning after Jenny and Geir left one of our traps was tripped. I strapped one of the backpacks to the back of the dirtbike, the blowpipe to the second backpack and tried to kick start the bike. It was quite cold and the bike refused to start at first and since I had my face mask and ski goggles on, the goggles fogged up from my body heat. When I got the bike running I had to take of the goggles to see something but tears started running from the cold wind and immediately froze in my eye lashes. There I was, bouncing around with little control of the bike heavily loaded, with a stupid Euro disco song in my headphones (I listen to my MP3 player to focus for the capture) when I come to think of an image of Gary Larson’s scientist and start laughing out loud. You know, the guys with white lab coats, hair in disorder and glasses way thicker than their biceps. Even though I am a researcher, I think that my appearance is as far from that guy as possibly can be. Though I am not sure which person that is the most amusing…

Yesterday I got a couple of emails from Bayara in UB saying that there is a really bad storm coming and that the authorities in South Gobi do not allow people to travel out of the villages. But Miji and Bo got a permission to leave Dalandzadgad. Well, if there is anyone who will make it through a storm in the Gobi that I know of I reckon that it is Bo. He is a super nice man and a typical biologist in many ways, specialized in conservation, butterflies and birds. He is also the only person I know who has fixed a gear box on a 4wd car with a Leatherman. That was the second time I was working for him in Kenya and our car broke down a couple of hours before our flight from Maasai Mara to Nairobi departed. Man, I’m happy if I’m able to figure out how to get the scissors out on the Leatherman, I have never really considered trying to fix something with it.

All 11 cameras are out. Yes, we have 11 again. Kim The one that Longtail tried to kill when we caught him has been repaired again. I will move two of the cameras but need to do some more fine-scale scouting of the area before I decide where to put them. I think that the new area looks very promising and I have snow tracks of two leopards in it!! I can’t say if it is two separate occasions or a pair of leopards and the snow is too patchy to get a good estimate of paw size. Still, it’s a good sign. Today was the first spring day, with 7 degrees above zero as the warmest record for 2009!

Five days

Alone again, seems to be the only time that I find enough time to write for the blog. I had a great time with Jenny and Geir and I hope, and think, that they enjoyed the visit. In three days Bo comes here. Bo will be one of my supervisors for my PhD. I met him six years ago when he sent me and Ulf, one of my best friends, to Maasai Mara, Kenya to herd cattle with the Maasai. That was one of the best times of my life and I can still tell stories from Africa ’til people fall asleep…

Geir and Jenny are the first people visiting camp that I’ve known before they came to camp. I don’t want to write that they are the first friends to visit because I think that I have made a few new friends here in camp. Never mind, when friends come and visit (especially when they travel all the way to the Gobi desert) a good host will try to make sure that they have a nice time and the highlight of a visit to our research camp is obviously a capture. So when Geir came in last Sunday morning with a big smile and the antenna out so we could hear trap # 4 (the same trap that we caught Aztai in) going on fast pulse both Jenny and I got out of the sleeping bags fast.

The snow leopard was sitting at the corner of a cliff looking at us as we approached with a sad/troubled expression on his face. Geir got some pictures of the cat that I think are… well, don’t want to say too much but I wonder how many better snow leopard pictures there are around. As we got closer we saw that the cat was already collared and when I walked up to him he barred his teeth and hissed at me. I knew it was Tsaagan even before I saw his spots. Interesting how they differ in behavior, Aztai simply lies down, giving me “the eye” while this guy is a lot more aggressive. Well, we got a weight for him (41.5 kg) and could determine that he is the cat formerly known as “Bummer” (the working name, or the name he got when we first photographed him was Bummer, now he is collared and from now on will be called Tsagaan) so at least the capture gave us some good information. Besides that Jenny and Geir got to see a snow leopard. 

The day after we collared him I got a mail from Kim saying that Tsagaan’s collar has malfunctioned. It only worked for five days before it gave up. So when we trapped him the second time he had a malfunctioning collar and we released him without changing it. Well. We didn’t know that it wasn’t working, can’t really tell by looking at it. Still it’s extremely irritating. What is even more irritating is the total lack of honor or pride of one’s products that you find nowadays. I have been joking a little about how easy it is to trap these leopards but the truth is that we work quite hard. 

We spent about 20 days scouting this area, climbing up and down in the mountains to find the best trap sites, then we deployed the trap cameras, checked them and collected them. Building the traps takes a couple of days of hauling heavy backpacks up and down, hammering in 3/4 inches rebars through rocks (we broke the handle to the sledge hammer and bent some rebars), digging, carrying rocks and so on. And when all this is done we check the traps visually every second day and listen to the transmitters at 18:00, 22:00, 01:30, 05:00, 08:00 and once in the middle of the day. I have some busy days when I am alone (since I am scouting a new trap area and deploying cameras in the daytime). This is the 47th working day in a row for me, and I will not have a day off for the next 20 days either (or until I catch Tsagaan again so I can change his collar). I will not write what I think about the technicians and engineers who built that collar, I think that you understand it. They are welcome to come and visit, maybe they will understand the importance of quality control after that. 

To end with some good news we deployed four cameras in our old trap area to see what was going on there and we got pictures of a new cat after three days. The cat looks slender and gives a feminine impression why we think that it is a female. To make sure that it is a female, we decided to give it a feminine name and Geir choose Kitty.

Five days…

Well, not much has happened here

After the hectic days in late February with snow leopards behind every rock and traps being tripped, cords being chewed off and Mongolians celebrating New Year, we have had some pretty relaxed days now. Tsagaan sar (New Year) was very interesting, we went to Midgi and Oyuna and some herders and ate some very good food and drank some very good stuff like fermented camel milk and some other not so good stuff that I don’t know what it was. We all paid the price the days after but Geir paid the highest price, being sick and weak for three days. After he had recovered we made a really nice dinner. Figure I should share the recipe so you can all try it: Fry thinly sliced goat, chopped onions, garlic and canned mushrooms in pieces with Indian chili powder in a wok pan and serve with mashed potatoes (made by potatoes, margarine, coffee creamer and hot water). For desert, a can of fruit cocktail. To top it off, you can open a box of orange juice. Yummy! 

We are trying to find a new area to deploy our cameras and later traps in but it’s not as easy as you may think. First we need and area with lots of snow leopard signs, and then there must be plenty of suitable sites for traps. Preferably neither Aztai nor Tsagaan should visit the area to avoid trapping them over and over. Finally, everyone is telling me to catch a female. Honestly, I’m a dirty, bearded Swede living in a tent in the Gobi desert, I’m not exactly David Beckham, what do I know of catching females? We have already tried perfume and nice looking rocks, didn’t work. Geir claims that the snow leopards probably have a mating central somewhere and if we only find it, our luck will be done. Maybe he’s right, it’s just we don’t know what a snow leopard mating central looks like… All suggestions are welcome.

Sometimes I wonder what I am doing, if I am mad who sits in a ger in the Gobi, cold, dirty and pretty alone. Other times I realize how incredibly lucky I am, I’m doing research on snow leopards, trapping them to start the first long term study on the species. It’s really nice to have Jenny and Geir here. Both for their company and because it is always better to experience things with friends and share experiences than to do it alone. But also because every evening after we’ve come back to the ger, with a fire burning in the stove and a kettle warming up and we sit down to bring back some life to our cold limbs, tired and hungry; Geir always says “This is not a bad life you know”. It isn’t. Maybe it’s a bit rough and lonely but we have all essentials and every day brings a couple of unique experiences. That is not bad, and it’s very good to be reminded about it once in a while.