The Night of The Leopards

I ended my last blog entry with “Time for the 11 p.m. trap check, perhaps we have caught something now”.

Well, one of the trap transmitters was indeed on fast pulse, I checked too see if I could pick up the signal from any of our collared cats and heard Tsagaan in the direction of the snare. That was good news, his collars needs to be changed.

We rapidly loaded two darts and packed all gear in the car. 45 minutes later we were near the snow leopard. I looked around the cliff wall and saw spotted fur and a pair of eyes looking at me. Though it was not Tsaagan, which I kind of knew, I hadn’t heard any growling and I my headlamp was not reflected in white, long teeth. Instead it was an un-collared cat.

The cat was very calm in the snare and if it hadn’t been for the strong wind it had been easy to dart it. The darts are propelled by compressed CO2 gas; one sets the pressure according to the distance to the target. With a correct setting, the impact will be very low and the snow leopard virtually un-harmed. Though this means that the darts fly fairly slow which together with their rather big size means that cross wind can easily move them off course.

I have a piece of foam attached to the outside wall of my ger and practice a lot with the gun to have a good knowledge of which pressure to use for different distances and different outside temperatures (extreme cold requires a higher pressure).

Anyways, I moved in quite close to avoid having the dart blown off course and shot. The cat was very calm which made me believe that it was a female. Nothing Macho about the comment but snow leopard females seems much calmer in the snare than males do.

The immobilization went well, except that I was wrong – it was another male… I still haven’t figured out how to catch females.

He weighed 39.5 kg and didn’t have any scars in his face, which all our adult males have. I think that he is a young male, probably 2.5 years old. We monitor the animals breathing, pulse and temperature every tenth minute through the sedation to make sure that they are doing fine. We have never had any problems with a cat but in case any of the vital signs move to a un-normal level – we have a god routine and equipment to handle the situation.

We woke the cat up after an hour and he rapidly recovered from the immobilization. Soon he had scaled a ridge and disappeared from our view. At 2.30 we got back to camp. Marhaan checked the trap signals and I cleaned the capture gear so that everything would be good to go.

When I checked the trap signals at 6 a.m. we had another alarm, 300 meters from where we caught the last cat. I was worried that he had stepped in another snare, but to my surprise it was Aztai who had been caught.

He behaved as nice as always in the snare, just lie there and look at me. This might sound like a contradiction of what I just wrote about snow leopard females but except for Aztai, all the males are much more aggressive. We didn’t have to measure him or change his collar so after weighing him we put him in the sleeping bag with a warm water bottle at his chest. It was still windy but not too cold, perhaps 5-8 degrees C below zero. Still, ten minutes after we had put him in the bag, his temperature had raised from 37 to 37.5 degrees C. Quite interesting that despite their extremely thick fur, they still benefit so much from the sleeping bag and water bottle. Perhaps that is why they like my sleeping bag so much that sometimes they seem reluctant to leave it.

That was a big night with lots of work and it took a while for me to recover from it. Two snow leopards caught in one night was not something that I had thought would happen. Good thing to prepare and keep the gear in order…

I wonder what these three males did in that area (Tsaagan was somewhere around too). The only explanation that I can find is that there was a female somewhere around. My guess is that she is pretty good looking too if she can attract all these guys, hope that I will catch her soon.