We have had a rare fortnight with no new snow leopard collared! The law of averages seems to be catching up after so many weeks where there have been at least one–and sometimes even two–snow leopards collared within a single night. Orjan is wondering if they have figured out his strategy. The truth is that this lull in collaring activity has given Orjan the much needed time to move around and visit the sites where he has seen location clusters; places where the cats have potentially had a successful hunt and have stopped for several days to feed. Orjan has been checking these sites to verify if they are kill sites and if so, to gather information such as terrain type and the prey species. There is also a German film crew with the team at the moment and although they have been there for almost two weeks they have yet to see a snow leopard. They are hoping to film a documentary on snow leopards and are seeing that studying the snow leopard is no cake walk and requires a lot of patience.
During the last two weeks, Aztai (green) patrolled the core of his home range, and appears to have made one kill. Shonkhor (red) has started to slowly behave as if he may have established his own territory. His movements were limited to the core of his home range. While his collar is still working, it continues to connect to the satellite inconsistently. We did, however, receive a cluster of locations between the 1st and 5th of April, which will be visited by Orjan for additional data sometime in the coming week. Devekh (blue) has continued to do what he does best: walk, walk, and walk some more! He walked all the way to the southern edge of the Tost Mountains and then returned to the North edge of the badlands. He now appears to be settling in around the badlands, and may have made another kill. It is quite interesting that he has been hunting successfully in this same spot ever since he was collared. We hope to learn more about this location and what draws him to it once it is visited by Orjan.
While we gear up for the busy month of June when the camera trapping and occupancy surveys resume, we are hoping we might have the opportunity to collar at least one more snow leopard in the coming weeks so that we can begin utilizing all of our current collars and continue tracking and comparing movement patterns of individual snow leopards.