Life sucks.

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.