A new female!

We caught a new cat at 04:05 this morning. The snare is just 300 meters from camp so we decided that it would stress the leopard less if we walked rather than taking the ATVs. On our way to the snare Friday joined us. She had been out hunting and now decided that it would be nice with some traveling companions. Our efforts to convince Friday not to follow us were futile and we didn’t want to go back to the ger with her. So the little cat was walking next to me like a well-mannered dog all the way until I put my lights on the snow leopard in the snare. The movie “Gone in 60 seconds” is nothing compared to Friday, she disappeared so fast when she saw the snow leopard that we didn’t even see her leaving.

The leopard is an older female, we guess that she is 7-8 years old but she could be up to 10, very hard to say. She weighed 35.7 kg and has lactated previously but was not lactating now. I am quite sure that we finally caught Agnes!! We first got pictures of her with two tiny cubs in summer 2009, though the cameras were not collected until spring 2010. Same week as I collected the cameras my grandmother passed away so I named the cat after her. Agnes the cat eluded us last time we were here but perhaps we have finally caught her. We’ll look at pictures later to compare.

It is very cold for being late April, we had about 5 degrees below zero plus a bone-freezing wind. When we had finished collaring and gathering samples we applied the hot-water bottles and wrapped the leopard in a windproof blanket and my Mongolian del (robe). She stayed there almost 30 minutes after we gave her the antidote, when she left we made sure that she was walking into a sunny area and that she had got her temperature back. While doing this we found leopard tracks heading for the snare. The distance between the pugmarks was about half of what is normal. Unless she had been stalking her way towards the snare (which seems unlikely) she must have had at least one cub with her.

OK, now it’s tea-time and shortly it will be nap-time.

Cat #16

Mood in camp got instantly better when the siren started and the LED under “Trap alarm” lit up early evening. We rushed to the ATVs and got to the snare about 50 minutes after it had been triggered. I can’t describe the relief when I looked over a hill and saw a snow leopard lying on the other side. It was extremely windy and he had not heard us coming. The cat crawled back against the wall and lied down looking at us. We went up to about ten meters from him and except for his eyes, he didn’t move a whisker. I didn’t want to shoot because the wind was coming from the side and the darts can easily fly more than a meter of course in such strong wind. So I took a few steps toward the cat, when I was about seven meters from him he barred all his teeth in a huge grin, saying “that is close enough”, still lying down. So I backed one step and he calmed down again and went back to just glaring at me. Had to wait for the wind to calm down for a second and then shot. We left the site and when we came back a few minutes later the cat was asleep in the same position.

Except for the wind the collaring was uneventful. It is quite difficult to gather all measurements, collect all samples and monitor vital signs when you have to put rocks on all the equipment to keep it from flying away. The cat is a new male (obviously), he weighed a little more than 44 kg and we think that he is 3-4 years old. It will be interesting to see if he is the new dominant male here. Shonkhor, the old dominant male in this range, died in summer 2011.

Now, we are eagerly waiting for the females. Pretty much the same as a lot of other guys on a Friday evening.

Gobi greets us with snow

Gary, the retired cougar reseracher that will assist me in April, and I arrived in Tost in early April. My camp is located in the north-western corner of the study area, in the area where Shonkhor had his home range. Now there are no collared cats around, I had planned to put out cameras here last autumn but due to the accident I had to go home before that could be done. We were a little anxious that there would not be any cats around and so we got very, very happy when we saw pugmarks and fresh scrapes on our way to camp. From the pugmarks it seemed to be more than one cat, though we couldn’t say if they had travelled together. Hopefully it is Agnes and her cubs.

The first days here were warm but the day after we started building snares we were hit by a snow storm. It snowed so much that we couldn’t even get the ATV’s through the snow. Day after the snow had been blown around and we could start digging out our snares, we tried to dig trenches for the cats to walk in and also get the snow away from the snares so they wouldn’t freeze when the temperature shifted. When we came back to the first snare that we had dug out we met tracks from a snow leopard! The cat had come down from a mountain, walked around our snare and trench in a half-circle. Then sat down two meters form the snare and after that left in another half circle. Could he have smelled the snare? Seemed odd. We saw that the cat was heading for another snare and followed it, the cat actullay stepped in that snare but it had probably frozen and didn’t catch him (I am writing him because the tracks were enormous).

We don’t understand what happened. If the cat could smell the snares it wouldn’t have stepped in the second. My best guess is that it saw us digging the trench and came down from the mountain once we had left to check out what we had been doing.

Two days later another cat stepped in a snare without getting caught. Mood in camp was pretty low, haven’t missed two cats in a row since 2008 and I don’t understand what is wrong.

We have checked some kill sites too. It requires 5-6 hours of motorbiking to get to the area where our collared cats are and my arm still isn’t in shape so I have to rest a couple of days after a long distance trip. Khashaa’s cub that we collared last autumn (M9) left his mother a couple of weeks ago and yesterday I found his first big kill – a female ibex. The little guy is growing up! Somehow that makes me a little proud.

Spring in the Gobi means storms, it has been blowing really hard for the last days and yesterday the coupling for our solar panels broke. We took all of them apart, cleaned the cables and took out the soldering iron to repair them. Then we realized that the soldering iron needs electricity-which requires solar panels. Like two dumbnuts we were looking at each other with the song “There’s a hole in the bucket dear Lisa, dear Lisa” playing in our heads…