Category: Follow The Cats

There was a lot of action from the South Gobi this week. Uplinks from Aztai (green) continued as usual, but the most exciting news was to receive data from Tsagaan (white) and Shonkhor (red). After almost three months of silence, we received two data uplinks from Tsagaan. He appears to be within his home range, …

It seems that Aztai (green) has been hungry in the New Year. After the Christmas feast we reported that he had on December 25th, he seems to have made another kill on the 5th of January, and then again on the 13th, though he remained for no more than two days at each site. He …

Christmas came a bit early this week. We had several uplinks from Saikhan’s collar (green), in addition to two hits from Shonkhor’s collar (purple) – a day apart at the same site. Although the number of uplinks is not sufficient to provide much information on recent movements, it does confirm that both cats are still …

If you look carefully, you’ll see that we did get a single uplink from Saikhan’s collar (a green dot near the “O” in “Mountains”). It came in on December 8th, and it looks like he may have visited a site where Aztai (yellow) was on a kill back on December 2nd/3rd.

If you compare these two maps, it looks very much like Aztai is “patrolling” his home range; he’s making regular visits to the edge, marking the boundaries of his territory. If we overlay the boundaries of his core home-range (derived from the locations we’ve been collecting over the past year), you really get a sense …

Attached is an updated map with recent locations from our radio-collared cats. We’re having just a bit of a problem getting the satellite feed form Tsagaan and Saikhan’s collars, but we’re confident they are still storing data. Aztai (yellow), on the other hand, is happily going in circles around our base camp.

Once again this week is mostly about Shonkhor. As you’ll recall from last week, Shonkhor had headed towards some of the rocky outcrops on the outskirts of western Toson Bumba. He then headed north to check out a few additional small outcrops before making a ~23 km (15 mile) beeline back to Toson Bumba in …

This week the news is mostly about Shonkhor.  He has continued his roving ways with a trip to some smaller mountains on the outskirts of Toson Bumba (~14 km/9 miles west of the main mountain range).  It’ll be interesting to see if he heads back to his usual area or continues further west to explore …

We pinpointed the location of Itgel’s collar to a spot near the top of a mountain in Toson Bumba.  This seemed an unlikely spot for a snow leopard to die or be caught in a trap set for wolves, so it seemed to support our earlier notion that Itgel had finally managed to slip his …