Category: Follow The Cats

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 …

This week’s map looks quite a bit like last week’s. Saikhan (green) is still in hanging out in the core of Aztai’s (yellow) home range and appears to have made at least one kill; he was at the same location from October 22nd to 24th, and at a second location from the 25th-26th. Shonkhor (purple) …

The last two weeks must have been the calm before the storm, as the cats are on the move again. Saikhan left the Tost Mountains on October 16th, made a brief visit to Toson Bumba very near the area where Itgel was captured, before showing up practically on top of the research camp on October …

The cats were pretty quiet again this week. Shonkhor continues to be a bit ‘bolder’ in his explorations than we’ve seen in the past. He visited the corridor area in the western Tost mountains and also ventured about 5km further west in Toson Bumba than we’ve seen him go before.