Cats and long days

We have collared three cats in the past two and a half week. First out was Aztai who got a collar with a new fix schedule, it will take GPS locations twice as often and hopefully we will be able to study his movements in more detail. He seems to be in good shape, well muscled and weighing in at 42kg with an empty stomach. Aztai is so experienced that he jumped away when he heard the dart gun fire (it makes a poff from the CO2 gas pressure), where there had been a nice spotted thigh 0.2 seconds earlier there was nothing but air when the dart reached.

Second cat was Khashaa, her collar had run out of battery and dropped off about a month ago. She had 2 big cubs with her that watched the whole procedure from a cliff above us. Khashaa weighed almost 42 kg, making her the heaviest female ever caught for research purposes. My brother has developed our trap surveillance system and installed a couple of microprocessors that analyzes the beeps from the trap transmitters. The system works great now, we haven’t had a single false alarm which means that as soon as the siren starts we are ready to go. Kullu, an Indian PhD student who usually works in the Himalayas, are here to do some work. He is the fastest climber I have seen, whenever the siren goes off he runs up and down the mountain to check which snare that has been tripped, doens’t take him more than a few minutes. We darted Khashaa about 25 minutes after she was trapped, that must be the fastest response time for any trapping research project.

Day after we collared Khashaa me and Carol went to pick up Tenger’s collar that had dropped off a few days earlier. The collar was lying far into a for me unknown mountain range. We had to drive on goat trails for a while to get there. Took us so long time that it got dark before we found our way back, spent four hours on the bike in total darkness before we found our camp. It is very hard to navigate when one can’t see the mountains.

Day after that we set out to check some kill sites. We lost our balance in loose gravel, it happened so fast that I didn’t have time to react and so we went down hard with the bike. Carol who was in the back got a few bruises and I injured my shoulder, still can’t move the upper arm much. Kullu had to go get an ATV and Miji to get us back home.

Yesterday we caught a new male. He weighed a little more than 30 kg, we think that he is one and a half years old and that it is one of Khashaa’s cubs, we saw tracks from a mother and cub at the trap site. From the GPS collars we should soon be able to tell if it is Khashaa’s cub or not. It would be great if it is, then we can follow him as he disperses away from her. Will be the first male disperser ever studied. I supervised and instructed Carol and Kullu but apart from that didn’t do much. Kind of nice to sit back for a change. Especially since that was our 15th snow leopard and with that we have collared as many individuals as all other studies combined.

Not much happening for me in a while, I’ll sit in camp and hope that the shoulder gets well soon.