With the exciting news that a female snow leopard is “on the air” in Mongolia, we have reached a major milestone. Our team had a total of six collars on hand, and they used them all.
What we are learning is already quite amazing. We found that the home ranges of Aztai and Bayartai overlapped extensively. Instead of using exclusive areas, the cats appear to be relying on the timing of their movements to avoid direct encounters that could result in aggressive confrontations. And, we’ve learned that these snow leopards are routinely using areas of 1,000 km2 (386 square miles) or more, revealing that we need to define our Snow Leopard Enterprise conservation efforts on a much broader scale than we previously envisioned.