Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who works at the base camp of our long-term research project in Mongolia. These are his adventures…
When we want to collar a snow leopard, we first have to restrain them using safe, non-harmful snares. All our snares are equipped with a small transmitter that sends out a VHF pulse or beacon. The transmitter sends out a pulse every second if the snare is OK. When an animal steps in the snare it will release a plunger from the transmitter that changes to a pulse every 1/2 second. Each transmitter has a unique VHF frequency that it sends out these pulses on. Earlier on we had to climb to an elevated position where one could hear all trap transmitters using a receiver and a hand-held antenna every third hour from dusk to late morning.
There were two problems with this method:
1. An animal could be in the snare up to four hours before we sedated it (three hour listening interval and one hour to get there). Four hours is pretty good compared to many other studies, but we want to minimize the time in the snare.
2. It wears researchers down to get up every three hours and climb a hill for up to 90 consecutive nights. Especially in midwinter when one has to put on heavy down clothes not to get frostbites. It is not possible to conduct denser manual intervals under these conditions.
Luckily Orjan’s brother Torbjorn happens to be very, very skilled at signal analysis and he offered to try and build an automatic surveillance system for us. The system consists of two parts, one that is placed on a mountain and one that is kept in the ger. The mountain station has a telescopic mast anchored in the ground and a little device that listens to all our trap transmitters. If a trap transmitter changes pulse or if the system lose contact with one of the trap transmitters – the mountain station sends a message to the “ger/yurt station”. This message activates a siren that is loud enough to wake even the most tired researcher. The siren is also activated in case the “ger station” loses contact with the “mountain station”. Meaning the system is foolproof.
This surveillance system reduces the time that an animal has to spend in the snare to the time the researchers has to get dressed, grab their gear and transport themselves to the site. Our capture gear is constantly ready to go so in most situations we can have the animal sedated 20-30 minutes after it got caught. The longest it can possibly take is one hour.
To our knowledge we are the first to have a system like this. Many of the major telemetry companies claimed that it wasn’t possible to build one when we contacted them. It is not possible to describe the relief that it has given both to the capture team who can now get some rest, but mainly to the animals who don’t have to wait before they are sedated, collared and released.
Thanks to Snow Leopard Trust donor Rhetick Sengupta for helping fund the building of this amazing new relay system.