There was a lot of action from the South Gobi this week. Uplinks from Aztai (green) continued as usual, but the most exciting news was to receive data from Tsagaan (white) and Shonkhor (red). After almost three months of silence, we received two data uplinks from Tsagaan. He appears to be within his home range, about 5 km east of our base camp. Shonkhor also seems to have returned to his home range, although in the last location that we received he appears to have headed straight towards Aztai’s home range. It will be interesting to see if he returns or continues his expedition. If you take a look at Aztai’s recent movement patterns, you will notice that he made visits to many points along the outermost border of his home range – seemingly doing border patrol checks! Based on the data that we have from Aztai’s collar, his home range seems to be fairly well defined, though he does make regular expeditions to investigate new areas.
While we can only speculate, there is a possibility that after several weeks of near silence from Tsagaan and Shonkhor, the collars may have accidentally turned upside down with their satellite phone transmitters now facing the sky; hence this array of uplinks. We hope to learn more once the collars are retrieved.
Orjan has left for the field. His goals include focusing first on attempting to recapture the known males in order to replace their collars. Once we have the collars in hand, we can download all the data points that were not able to transmit to the satellite. After replacing the collars, he will follow the trails of females using information from photo trap cameras. The females continue to elude Orjan, as far as snow leopards are concerned, but we are hopeful that this will change in 2010.
For more information about our new 3-D range maps, visit our FAQ page.