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 am doing something wrong. We placed a collar on our fourth snow leopard a couple of days ago. It is a … male. Surprise eh? Don’t know what it is that I do but I don’t seem to be able to collar females. The leopard is probably a youngster, he was quite small and weighed a little less than 35 kg. We named him Shonkhor (it means falcon in Mongolian). There is a pair of falcons nesting at the collaring site and falcons symbolize youth in Mongolia (according to Nadia). When I approached Shonkhor, he rolled around and laid on his back. Tricky. Very tricky. 
The collaring procedure went smooth and Emma managed to get blood samples from him (I bow my head and admit that I have been beaten in that skill)…
I hope that Shonkhor is a youngster and that he is moving around to find an area to settle down in. Would be great to get some data on snow leopard dispersal.
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