Bayad's Collar Found
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After a few tense months of wondering whether we would ever find the GPS collar that Bayad the snow leopard carried for over a year, our dedicated team has at last claimed the prize!
After a few tense months of wondering whether we would ever find the
GPS collar that Bayad the snow leopard carried for over a year, our
dedicated team has at last claimed the prize, high in the mountains of
Pakistan's Chitral Province.
The collar had been programmed to drop off Bayad in January, so around the beginning of the year the research team began searching for and following the collar's signal with our high-tech VHF receiver. After this proved fruitless—team leader Jaffar Ud-Din suspects that the area's rough terrain caused the signal to bounce around and lead the searchers astray—SLT/WWF Staff members Muhammad Ayub and Siraj Khan, along with Park Wildlife Watcher Zakir, decided to build their own tracking device using an old FM radio.
It worked! They soon found the collar in the buffer zone of Chitral Gol National Park, in what must have been a day den in a crevice high on a cliff face. Bayad probably went in and slept for the day, the collar opened as programmed, and she walked out leaving the collar behind in a very tough place for the team to find it. Maqsood, another Park Wildlife Watcher, climbed in the tight crevice to retrieve the device.
The find opens up the next phase in our groundbreaking satellite-tracking study of wild snow leopards. The collar was designed to pinpoint and record the cat's position using GPS technology every 8 hours, but as we previously reported in this newsletter, we had trouble uploading the data via satellite as planned. Now that the collar is in hand we will soon access the 1,000 or more records stored in the collar itself. This will yield a more detailed record of a snow leopard's daily movements than we have ever had before, and greatly increase our understanding of the cat's behavior in the wild.
The collar had been programmed to drop off Bayad in January, so around the beginning of the year the research team began searching for and following the collar's signal with our high-tech VHF receiver. After this proved fruitless—team leader Jaffar Ud-Din suspects that the area's rough terrain caused the signal to bounce around and lead the searchers astray—SLT/WWF Staff members Muhammad Ayub and Siraj Khan, along with Park Wildlife Watcher Zakir, decided to build their own tracking device using an old FM radio.
It worked! They soon found the collar in the buffer zone of Chitral Gol National Park, in what must have been a day den in a crevice high on a cliff face. Bayad probably went in and slept for the day, the collar opened as programmed, and she walked out leaving the collar behind in a very tough place for the team to find it. Maqsood, another Park Wildlife Watcher, climbed in the tight crevice to retrieve the device.
The find opens up the next phase in our groundbreaking satellite-tracking study of wild snow leopards. The collar was designed to pinpoint and record the cat's position using GPS technology every 8 hours, but as we previously reported in this newsletter, we had trouble uploading the data via satellite as planned. Now that the collar is in hand we will soon access the 1,000 or more records stored in the collar itself. This will yield a more detailed record of a snow leopard's daily movements than we have ever had before, and greatly increase our understanding of the cat's behavior in the wild.