Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who works at the base camp of our long-term research project in Mongolia. These are his adventures…
The last cat has been collared for this portion of the season. And the cat is a female.
She weighed little less than 25 kg. I think that she is two years old and I’m guessing that she has had problems to find food after she left her mother. It had rained, and when I came up to her she looked like a fluffy fur-ball, all hairs standing up. Not even when they are wet do snow leopards smell like anything. But their coat gets even fluffier than normal when they have dried.
The cat doesn’t have a name yet, for now she is known as F2.
The temperature has changed a lot during the last days and spring has finally arrived (I’m hoping, maybe it is just fooling me and it will get cold again). Three days ago I took off my thermal underwear. I have worn them constantly since the 8th of February. Well, except for the brief moments that I’ve rinsed my body. Feels strange not to wear them, but very good. Hasn’t been any point in taking them off in night either before since I have to get up every third hour and it is still cold in the nights.
I finished investigating snow leopard hunting sites yesterday so for the next week I will try to classify ibex to get a better idea of the population structure. In a week Koustubh and Bayara will arrive in camp, and soon after that the camera trapping and occupancy surveys will start. In two weeks my brother and his wife will also come here. My brother has built a neat little system that we are going to test. I will describe it separately, provided that it works; otherwise, he can describe what it’s like to walk from camp to Ulan Bator…