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…