Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who bought a one-way ticket to Mongolia to work at the base camp of our long-term research project. These are his adventures…
I have collected all trap cameras and am moving them to a new area. Mt. Chris will be the north western corner of the trap area. Basically, we will search for good trap sites in a square of 3x 3 km from Mt. Chris, more or less.
My knees have taken a little beating and to minimize the hiking (it will take some hiking to find new trap sites) I decided to close the traps. At the time, this seemed reasonable because we haven’t had an unmarked snow leopard visiting the trap area since the 25th of August. Well, four days ago “Inquisitive” stepped in two traps. Or rather, where there should have been two traps. The cat was named Inquisitive by the summer team, reason is that the first pictures we have of it, he/she looks into the camera from a distance of about 20 cm, and the cat keeps looking for a while. Our guess is that the cat is a young individual; it behaves a bit reckless, not at all like Bayartai (Longtail). I think that our youngster is a little afraid of Longtail and dared to visit the trap area because Longtail has been away for a little while. It seems as if he is heading back now though so hopefully, Inquisitive will move into my new trap area.
In a little while that is, I have to build it first.