Archive for November, 2012

Last post (at least for a while)

November 27, 2012

Four years and four months ago I arrived in Ulaanbaatar for the first time, I came here thinking that I would join an international team of scientists but on the way from the airport to my hotel I was told that it was actually just me who would live in camp. I knew almost nothing about Mongolia, snow leopards, how things worked here or even what a ger looked like. I had heard about scientists who had worked with snow leopards for 20 years without even seeing one, and I was here to capture these cats.

Today I am back in Ulaanbaatar, I have just finished my last field session. It has been an incredible four years with more stories than I can ever tell. We’ve collared 19 different snow leopards, many of them have been captured again and had their collars changed. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have seen snow leopards by now but I will always remember the number of dens that we have found. It is two, both found on the same day.

I think that I have spent about two full years in camp, during this time I have trapped for a little more than 450 nights. I’ve broken an arm, exhausted a knee and bent my nose. The longest period alone was 45 consecutive days, the longest period without a shower was 207 consecutive days. In total I have driven a little more than 16 000 km on a dirt bike. It feels a bit as if I am a new person after all experiences, cultural differences and adventures out here. In a way it is true – my combined weight loss for all trips is almost equal to my total bodyweigh so I guess you could say that at least this is a new body. It sure looks older and more scared.

We have collected more data than any other snow leopard study, now it is time to start analysing it. I hope that our efforts will increase the chances for the snow leopard and their ecosystems to sustain.

I will likely not write on this blog again, at least not for a while.

Thanks for reading my texts and for all the comments, thanks also to all the people who has assisted me out in camp and to the organizations that has supported me with equipment: Klättermusen, Houdini, Flygbasjägarskolan, Hilleberg and Swedteam.

Orjan out.

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Life sucks.

November 23, 2012
Still no sprung snares. We are about to give up, there are only four nights left until we’ll collect the snares. It feels really bad to end 4.5 years of fieldwork with such a failure. But I don’t regret that I chose this area. When I plot the positons from our collared cats there is a ‘hole’ with no cats at all in the area where we are. There are lots of ibex here, we see them almost every day, and the mountains are usually full of snow leopard sign. But not this time. In all the other trap areas there are cats with working collars, we don’t want to trap them so this is the right place to be. If only there had been at least one cat around.
 
We are wrapping up the last data collections now, on the 25th we are leaving camp. Today we were up in the north-western part of the study area. We saw four fresh snow leopard tracks in the snow there. Great that there are still cats in Tost but why aren’t they here?  
 
I have two Swedes with me in camp – Gustaf who is Snow Leopard Trust’s new Assistant Science Director and Johan. Gustaf is superexcited about the place, he is here to see how the fieldwork is done and get an introduction to Mongolia. A long time ago when I did my military service we were paired up two and two. Johan and I was a pair, for about a year we did everythng together and were almost never more than five meters apart. Even though that was a long time ago it feels as yesterday when we work together in field. It is almost as in the old days except that we are not wet, exhausted, carrying around way too heavy backpacks and have no blisters. Living in a ger in the Mongolian winter and doing trap checks is a bit like vacation. Or it would have been if I was still in shape.
 
On the 23rd there’s a camel race close to our Base Camp. These races are quite uncommon and very presigeuos to win, hopefully we will have time to go there and watch the race.

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The eye of the storm

November 8, 2012
This is very strange, nothing at all happens in our trap area. We have not seen a single pugmark in the snow or gravel, scrape or scent mark since we started building snares. I’m starting to think that this will be the first trip that we’ll not get any cats. There is usually a lot of activity in this area, last time I was here we got six captures in a bit more than three weeks.
 
The ibex and argali are rutting now so the big males are occupied with keeping an eye on their females and make sure that no other male comes near them. Guess that means that they have less time to look out for snow leopards. We do find a lot of big males at kill sites this time of year. Since it is rather cold the carcasses stay fresh for a long time and our collared cats often stay on the kills for 8-10 days. Perhaps all the cats are lying still and burping ibex instead of patrolling their home ranges. That could explain the lack of activity in the trap area.
 
Sumbee and six students will arrive today or tomorrow. They are here to conduct a population estimate of the ibex, this is easiest during the rut. I’ll see if I can get them to herd some ibex this way.
 
Not much else to report. Except that I got some debris in my eye while checking trap signals. This happened in winter 2010 too. At that time my girlfriend Marie was here. I was so tired that I fell asleep even though the eye hurt pretty badly. In the morning I didn’t see very much at all. We boiled salt water and tried to rinse the eye without any luck. Sort of gave up and started planning for how to get to a hospital when Miji appeared out of the blue. We gave him a cup of tea and some (dry) bread. Miji saw my futile attempts to rinse the eye and after a while said -“Miji” and then licked round and round with his tounge in the air. Marie claims that I turned white and started rinsing the eye even more ferociously. The only thing I could think of was the bread crumbs and that he doesn’t have any teeth left. In the end I gave up and told Miji to give it a try. He pushed me down on the bed, stuck his tounge in my eye and licked it round and round. Kind of scary but he got the debris out!
 
This summer I was at the optometrist to check my eyesight. She said that I have soem weird scars on my eye and asked what had happend to it. I replied -“An old Mongolian man licked me in the eye”, that was the end of the discussion. 
 
So, when this happened again a few days ago I again tried to rinse the eye. Again without luck. I really didn’t want to get the ‘tounge treatment’, Byron didn’t seem thrilled by the idea either so I guess it would have been off to Miji as a last resort. Scarred of the dentist comes in a new light. In the end we filled a big syringe with water and rinsed the eye, took almost 100 ml of water but finally we got it out!

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First part of the last field session

November 8, 2012
The roadtrip to camp was rather eventful as we ended up in both thick fog and snowfall at the same time. We passed a severe traffic accident outside of UB, don’t think many passengers had survived it. The roads here are dangerous to travel. As we left the roads and started following the roadtracks south the fog got thicker, for a while everything was white – couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the ground began. With no visible tracks I have no idea how Miji found his way, had I been driving we would have ended up in Russia. Still, somehow we reached camp. We spent the first days getting the ger in order and sorting all trapping and capture gear. Once that was done we started hking around in the canyons looking for fresh snow leopard signs. We found hour old tracks from a leopard in a canyon nearby and a reasonable amount of scrapes and scent marks in the area. The trap area does not look super exciting but we should get a couple of cats at least. We finished building snares six days ago and now we have thirteen of them waiting for a cat. Since then not much has happened, we picked up Lasya’s collar day before yesterday. It had dropped on the exact date it was scheduled to, 18 moths after I deployed it. That is German precision for you.
 
The last days we have tried to get the vehicles in working condition. By changing parts between the two ATVs and the two bikes we now have one ATV and one motorbike that works. Miji and I was working on the motorbike for several hours. At a point we had most of the bike in pieces, including the fuel line and carburator. This is a big thing for me, I didn’t even know what a carburator was when I got here four years ago. Miji is good with engines and I have learned quite a bit about the bikes so together we managed to get the carburator to work again. I explained in my Mongolian “this-say-gas-now- (to)this” and so on.
 
Byron, my team mate, had a fever today so I set out for the first kill site searches on my own. The weather is pretty cold, Miji has piled up with a gigantic amount of different kind of fuel for his stove. He says that it will be the coldest winter in a long time. Not sure how he knows but so far he is correct. Anyways, after the first kill site, which was a rather big Argali male that Ariun had killed d killed it started snowing. I got to the second and third but on the way back from that the snow picked up rather dramatically. In the end I coulnd’t see more than 2-300 meters. Navigating your way out of the mountains is sort of dependent upon seeing the mountains, otherwise there is no way of telling where the valleys and passes are. It didn’t worry me too much, until I got back to the bike and it refused to start. I hadn’t fine-tuned the carburator and now it didn’t want to work in the cold. It was about 30 km to camp so no way that I would make it back on foot before it got dark. I was preparing mentally to spend the night in the mountains, wouldn’t be fun but couldn’t get worse than a few frostbites at the most. Though, at last the engine started. I guess Yamaha doesn’t joke when they write that only authorized dealers should work on the carburators… 
 
It’s difficult to ride in snow cause you don’t see the holes and rocks but a couple of hours later, after navigating a dirtbike through snow and snowdrifts I reached camp. Now even my hands have thawed out.
 
Tomorrow we will see if we have to dig the snares out and hopefully soon catch a cat. So far the score is -1 collar (Lasya’s dropped so we have one more in camp now then when we started) so we need to catch one to get back on zero.

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