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…

Field season over for now

Seems like my shoulder is worse than I had hoped. I had it examined by a doctor in Ulaan Baatar and he ordered me to go home, nothing broken but I have injured some muscles. Need an MRI (magnetröntgen in Swedish) to tell whether to do surgery or not. No matter, my field season is over for 2011, still can’t move my upper arm. Hope to return in spring 2012. See you then.

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.

Ready, set, go!

We have set a new record by getting camp in order, checking the trapping area and building four snares in just four days. I just finished cleaning the gers and mixing new drugs, tomorrow Tom and the others will arrive. Three months of office work at home with too much food and too little workout has left me with a rather increased waist measure and a much too decreased biceps measure. Am a little worried that I have already started with my ‘Cat trapper breakfast’ – two mugs of hot water with two tablespoons of Nescafé in each and a couple of painkillers on the side. I usually don’t start with that until later, could be a long field session…

I found pugmarks at seven snare sites yesterday, can’t tell how old they are since I just arrived and don’t know what the weather has been like but they must be fairly new. Man, I gotta say that the four snares look good, I put in a lot of effort in them. Will be a little sad if anything steps in them and messes them up. Well if it is a snow leopard I suppose it is OK.

Cheers,
Orjan

Towards Tost

For all you who share my view that long international flights in economy class are horribly boring I can recommend flying to Ulaan Bataar from Moscow. You will never know exactly what will happen, just that it will probably not be a regular flight. At the gate was ten or so Russian and Chech hunters in camouflage and bandanas, so drunk that they could barely stand up. Makes me sad to see, they represent nothing that I associate with hunting. I was surprised that they were allowed to board the plane and even more surprised that they were allowed to sit on the armrests and sing as we taxied for take-off. They behaved like annoying drunken old men with a lot of money (I’ve heard that it costs about 15 000 USD to shoot an ibex or Argali) for the rest of the flight. Speaking of the flight, my ticket said it was a direct flight but just before we entered Mongolia the plane landed in Krasmoyovsk (or something similar), apparently the fuel is cheaper in Russia so they decided to fill up the plane before landing in UB…
What is a scheduled flight plan against market economy and good bizznizz.

At landing the pilot announced that it was 3 degrees below zero, the Italian man next to me who wore shorts and a T-shirt looked quite baffled… He will learn the lesson that “guidebooks can be worth their price” the hard way.

On the way to UB our car collided with a truck, the other river had fallen asleep. Luckily Miji is a great driver and escaped a head on collision. That saved his life but he is still in hospital. I went to visit him and gave him postcards from many of the Swedes who has been in camp. Miji got so happy that he hugged me (which is a big thing for a Mongolian man). We all hope that he will get well soon, the time in Tost without him will be very empty.

Tomorrow I am leaving for camp, will have four days to set up camp and build snares before Tom and a TV-guy from ABC arrives together with Nadia, Kullu from India and a volunteer from Australia. As Tom leaves a group from WWF arrives. Will try to write but I expect to be busy until 22nd of October or so.

Lightning Strikes

One of the very rare thunderstorms raged here one night and lightning struck close to our surveillance system [what we use to check if a snow leopard is in the area]. We had not thought about making the system lightning proof and some of the very sensitive components designed to detect very weak electric pulses suddenly got overloaded by the electrical discharge. I tried to repair it but must admit that my knowledge in this field ends at ‘something smells burnt in this box’.

Back to climbing the mountain for signal checks…

This time of year Friday, the resident housecat, usually leaves the ger in the evening to hunt hamsters. She had been gone for a whole day when I went towards the mountain on the 23:00 signal check. Couple hundred meters from camp, just where we start to climb the mountain I saw two eyes looking at me. I got really happy, having found Friday since I was a little worried that she had been gone so long. “There you are Friday, come here now” I exclaimed in a friendly voice. The animal simply looked at me. I walked over to her in a casual way, sometimes she decides to play ‘chase the cat’ if she senses that I’m trying to catch her. As I closed in I noticed that it was quite far between the eyes, didn’t look quite like Friday. Well, I was heading that direction anyways so I kept walking and again said “come here now”. As I got even closer the animal moved a little and I started doubting that this could be Friday, seemed way too big, though it is hard to estimate both distances and size in dark. Soon after that, it came trotting across the valley and passed me, then I saw that it was a snow leopard. The snow leopard climbed a hilll on the side where I came from and sat down to look at me. Must have got confused when I walked casually to it, calling in a friendly voice now and then.

They say that a human must have access to the basic needs such as sleep, shelter, food and water before other things matter. It’s probably true because even though it is a great experience to see the cats my main thought was “get out of my way so I can get up on the mountain and back to bed”.

45 minutes later we learned that Anu was 200 meters on the other side of camp. I suppose that it was her that I saw. Not sure why she lingered so long around my camp and why the location was so close to the toilet… but I’m going to be wary whenever I need to visit the toilet. Just in case.

Climbing the Pinnacles

In mid-April, Aztai and Khashaa spent three days at the same place. The collar locations were spread out in a line and it seemed as if they had slowly, slowly moved down a steep mountainside. We got curious about what might have happened there, from looking at the computer it didn’t seem like a hunting site but to know for sure we had to go there. The place is a steep canyon side and the locations follow a line of steep (almost vertical) rock formations, almost like pinnacles. They are about 20 m wide and 10-15 m high. On each side of the pinnacles are a field of loose gravel and rocks, very steep and very loose. Most of the locations are on the pinnacles but some are at the base of them. It was not possble to visit all locations, the terrain was just too steep and rugged. However, there were no signs of a hunt and the terrain doesn’t look like anything that I have found kills in previously. Since the two cats were moving down along the pinnacles they would have had to drag their meall with them up and down, which doesn’t make much sense. So the only likely explanation for them to spend so much time together is that they mated. We got a couple locations taken at the same time when the cats’ collars were within 1 m of each other.

I know that mid April is late for a mating but maybe Khashaa mated with Aztai. He seems to be the new dominant male of the area. Aztai sure didn’t wait many days after Tsagaan died before he took over his area. While Tsagaan was our ‘bad boy’, always growling at me and keeping three collared females in his home range that he ventured between and spent at most a day with now and then. Aztai, on the other hand, found a nice cliff with a view all the way to China and spent three days getting to know Khashaa.

Cheers,

Orjan

On a break, sort of…

After an insane collaring session where we had six snow leopards in 20 nights, we have closed up our equipment. We do not want to find the same individuals too many times and I started getting a little tired. Usually one has a few nights of rest after a collaring, but we never seemed to get any ‘nights off’. And, the nights off still involved hiking up and down a mountain to check signals. At least until the monitoring system comes back from being upgraded in Sweden.

I have had a cameraman with me since the start of this session, ha has filmed all six collaring sessions. When he came here he was worried that he wouldn’t get to film a collaring, now he is concerned that he can’t use all the footage cause the viewers will get the impression that it is super-easy to find snow leopards.

An old hunter, Dorj, came to our ger a couple of days ago and told me he had found a dead snow leopard far out in the west. We went there to take a look at it together, unfortunately the cat had been dead for a long time. It was a male, probably two years old and we found him at the edge of a small mountain far out in the steppe. Perhaps he was dispersing and starved to death, at least that is what Dorj thinks happened and there is nothing that contradicts him. I collected some samples from the carcass, maybe they can provide more information.

On another note I plotted the locations from our collared cats and noticed that it didn’t take long for Aztai to take over parts of Tsagaan’s territory. As sad as it is that we lost Tsagaan we can still learn things from his death. There has been a clear border between Aztai’s and Tsagaan’s ranges which they almost never crossed. It must be very important to constantly mark one’s territory since Aztai learned that Tsagaan was gone so fast and immediately moved in to take over the range. Even though we can’t draw any conclusions about snow leopards in general it proves that these two big males were highly territorial towards each other.

A New Collaring Record!

We have set a new collaring record and put out four GPS radio collars in 15 days. First we put a collar on a new female, called F5 for now; she is probably 2-3 years old and weighed 30 kg.

Five days later we got two alarms at the same time. The first alarm was Aztai waiting to get a new collar. His old collar was scheduled to drop off within a day. Pretty good timing to have it changed out. We worked as fast as we could with the old boy. He seemed to be in good shape and was as nice as ever.

Then 3 km further southwest was a new female waiting for us. She weighed 36 kg and I estimated her to be 4 years old; her ID is F6. Pretty tough little girl, she snarled and barred her teeth. She was in a safety-snare that my friend and assistant Carl-Fredrik insisted that we should build. He claimed that we would attract a cat instantaneously. On his last day in camp we built it and two days later we collared F6. All you who do not think that I will hear about that for the rest of my life, please raise a hand…

That was one long day, we set out at 11 in the evening and returned to camp close to five in the morning. After some well deserved rest we set about to repair equipment and fix things in camp. Five days after our crazy night we collared Khavar again! [Last October, Khavar’s collar unexpectedly fell off six month early]. He has gained 10 kg and now weighs 40.7 kg. I am pretty sure that he is 3 years old and that he will soon give Aztai a match for who will rule this area.

Tsagaan Dies

Two days ago I got an email saying that Tsagaan had been in the same place for four days and after that we had not received any locations for seven days. The site is far from camp and we did not know what had happened to him but to be prepared for anything we packed our motorbikes with darting equipment, food, water, headlamps, clothes, necropsy sample kit etc.

Unfortunately we found Tsagaan lying dead high up on a mountain. He had chosen a sheltered cliff wall with a magnificent view for his final resting place. There were no visible wounds on the body and as of now we do not know what he died of, hopefully a necropsy can provide some answers.

The collaring study provides insights in some snow leopard individuals lives and changes them from a ‘grey mass’ somewhere far out in the mountains into individuals with their own personality. I have caught Tsagaan five times over the last three years, after the first time I always knew that it was he who was in the snare even before I had seen him. Before I was in sight of him he greeted me with a growl and as I approached him he hissed and bared his teeth, trying to scare me. None of the other cats have behaved as aggressive as he did. His complete opposite is Aztai, a male of similar size whom I have also caught five times. Aztai lies still in the snare and settles with staring at me, I have even led him away from a steep cliff, holding his collar as he was walking away from the capture site. I would not have tried that with Tsagaan.

As I hike in the mountains here I often try to imagine what it is like to be a snow leopard. For a cat this must be the perfect terrain. They are the undisputed kings of these mountains. No one can touch them here, let alone harm them, with the exception of humans with our technology. Sure I am able to catch them but I use tools that are far from natural. And as I try to climb the slopes, stumbling and catching my breath even though I never venture into the really rugged parts that the snow leopards love, I must be quite a feeble sight to them. Tsagaan must have seen me many times, recognizing my red jacket. I bet that he wondered how that miserable creature could have caught him.

Tsagaan was the dominant male of a large part of central Tost which he ruled since at least February 2009 when we first collared him. His home range encompassed all three of our collared females. That is not a bad life, right? Since none of the females have cubs at the moment, there is a good chance that we will see little Tsagaan Juniors arriving in the South Gobi this summer.

Cheers,

Orjan