On a break, sort of…

After an insane collaring session where we had six snow leopards in 20 nights, we have closed up our equipment. We do not want to find the same individuals too many times and I started getting a little tired. Usually one has a few nights of rest after a collaring, but we never seemed to get any ‘nights off’. And, the nights off still involved hiking up and down a mountain to check signals. At least until the monitoring system comes back from being upgraded in Sweden.

I have had a cameraman with me since the start of this session, ha has filmed all six collaring sessions. When he came here he was worried that he wouldn’t get to film a collaring, now he is concerned that he can’t use all the footage cause the viewers will get the impression that it is super-easy to find snow leopards.

An old hunter, Dorj, came to our ger a couple of days ago and told me he had found a dead snow leopard far out in the west. We went there to take a look at it together, unfortunately the cat had been dead for a long time. It was a male, probably two years old and we found him at the edge of a small mountain far out in the steppe. Perhaps he was dispersing and starved to death, at least that is what Dorj thinks happened and there is nothing that contradicts him. I collected some samples from the carcass, maybe they can provide more information.

On another note I plotted the locations from our collared cats and noticed that it didn’t take long for Aztai to take over parts of Tsagaan’s territory. As sad as it is that we lost Tsagaan we can still learn things from his death. There has been a clear border between Aztai’s and Tsagaan’s ranges which they almost never crossed. It must be very important to constantly mark one’s territory since Aztai learned that Tsagaan was gone so fast and immediately moved in to take over the range. Even though we can’t draw any conclusions about snow leopards in general it proves that these two big males were highly territorial towards each other.

A New Collaring Record!

We have set a new collaring record and put out four GPS radio collars in 15 days. First we put a collar on a new female, called F5 for now; she is probably 2-3 years old and weighed 30 kg.

Five days later we got two alarms at the same time. The first alarm was Aztai waiting to get a new collar. His old collar was scheduled to drop off within a day. Pretty good timing to have it changed out. We worked as fast as we could with the old boy. He seemed to be in good shape and was as nice as ever.

Then 3 km further southwest was a new female waiting for us. She weighed 36 kg and I estimated her to be 4 years old; her ID is F6. Pretty tough little girl, she snarled and barred her teeth. She was in a safety-snare that my friend and assistant Carl-Fredrik insisted that we should build. He claimed that we would attract a cat instantaneously. On his last day in camp we built it and two days later we collared F6. All you who do not think that I will hear about that for the rest of my life, please raise a hand…

That was one long day, we set out at 11 in the evening and returned to camp close to five in the morning. After some well deserved rest we set about to repair equipment and fix things in camp. Five days after our crazy night we collared Khavar again! [Last October, Khavar’s collar unexpectedly fell off six month early]. He has gained 10 kg and now weighs 40.7 kg. I am pretty sure that he is 3 years old and that he will soon give Aztai a match for who will rule this area.