After an insane collaring session where we had six snow leopards in 20 nights, we have closed up our equipment. We do not want to find the same individuals too many times and I started getting a little tired. Usually one has a few nights of rest after a collaring, but we never seemed to get any ‘nights off’. And, the nights off still involved hiking up and down a mountain to check signals. At least until the monitoring system comes back from being upgraded in Sweden.
I have had a cameraman with me since the start of this session, he has filmed all six collaring sessions. When he came here he was worried that he wouldn’t get to film a collaring, now he is concerned that he can’t use all the footage cause the viewers will get the impression that it is super-easy to find snow leopards.
An old hunter, Dorj, came to our ger a couple of days ago and told me he had found a dead snow leopard far out in the west. We went there to take a look at it together, unfortunately the cat had been dead for a long time. It was a male, probably two years old and we found him at the edge of a small mountain far out in the steppe. Perhaps he was dispersing and starved to death, at least that is what Dorj thinks happened and there is nothing that contradicts him. I collected some samples from the carcass, maybe they can provide more information.
On another note I plotted the locations from our collared cats and noticed that it didn’t take long for Aztai to take over parts of Tsagaan’s territory. As sad as it is that we lost Tsagaan we can still learn things from his death. There has been a clear border between Aztai’s and Tsagaan’s ranges which they almost never crossed. It must be very important to constantly mark one’s territory since Aztai learned that Tsagaan was gone so fast and immediately moved in to take over the range. Even though we can’t draw any conclusions about snow leopards in general it proves that these two big males were highly territorial towards each other.