This week, a message came in via sattelite phone from Dr. Tom McCarthy, leader of our long-term research project in Mongolia. Right now, he is at our base camp, called Tserendeleg. Out there in the South Gobi, little things like and outhouse and electricity mean a lot . . .
Greetings from Camp Tserendeleg!
Just a short update on life here at camp. To start with, this place is great, our team has done an incredible job of making this a real working camp. The gers are now very well equipped, for instance the office ger has 3 work tables, 8 chairs, a bookshelf, storage bin and off course is wired for electricity with lights and outlets for computers and charging dozens of fancy gadgets from trap camera batteries to walkie talkies.
The cooking ger is no less well equipped and our cook, Oyuna, is a gourmet! Oyuna’s husband, Mijid, is quite a handyman . He even built an outhouse with a window!
The grounds have a stone perimeter and are kept spotless. The generator is housed in a small shed built by Mijid and electricity is run with buried wires to every one of the 4 gers. There is even a stone lined walkway to the outhouse.
Cats: We have 182 trap camera photos of snow leopards! You won’t believe some of them. On rapid-fire mode the camera will take pics at a rate of 2 or 3 per second and some encounters run several seconds with up to 30 images so it’s almost like a mini film clip. You can see cats walk in and scrape in front of the camera. I am guessing we may have nearly 1,000 images of ibex with some encounters containing 50 or so pics. Amazing stuff.
That’s about it for now. I will write in a few days when we have more news.
Cheers,
Tom
I love this blog. It has a heap of great info. I will definitely be back again! Thank you!