The most remarkable journey to date came from Shonkhor this fortnight! Shonkhor (red), collared in April last year, has taken an extensive expedition to the west, much further than where he wandered in previous weeks. Shonkhor’s last location was 60 km west of our base camp. We are curious to see if he continues to go further west, which could land him in either the protected area of Gurvan Saikhan – shown on the map as a red dashed line – or the Great Gobi (South West). He is quite a mover!
Two weeks ago, we informed you that we had collared a male snow leopard, which we’d temporarily named M8, because he’s the 8th male in the study. M8 is now known as “Khavar,” which means “spring” in Mongolian. Its a fitting name for this young male (34kg), collared in late April just as the spring grasses finally began to arrive. We’ve been excited to see how Khavar interacts with the other snow leopards our the long-term study. Aztai, the first snow leopard we collared (Aztai was collared in 2008), now appears to have more company than we’d known, and possibly tough competition from Khavar. A quick look at their recent locations reveals that Khavar (purple) is utilizing an area that nearly completely overlaps with what we call Aztai’s (green) home range. Aztai’s movements have been rather restricted to the core of his home range area in these last two weeks, perhaps due to this interface with Khavar.
Only a few uplinks have been received from Devekh’s collar, the snow leopard collared in February. We are confident that his collar is still obtaining GPS fixes and storing them onboard, yet the number of satellite uplinks appears to be falling dramatically over time. We will continue to monitor this change to assess whether Devekh is in areas where it is difficult to connect, or if there appears to be damage to the collar’s antenna. If the collar continues to malfunction, we will attempt to re-collar him. As you can see from the two uplinks on the map (shown in blue), Devekh is in close proximity to where Aztai and Khavar are patrolling. We are curious to see if and how these three males interact, and to understand more about what draws them to this landscape.