The eye of the storm

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!