By request, here is a photo of dear little Friday, the cat who has adopted our researchers as her own humans and now lives at the base came of our long-term snow leopard study in Mongolia. She had kittens this year and made sure they stayed warm by putting them in our sleeping bags.
Tag: Mongolia
Snow doesn't stop snow leopard research
Dear blog readers, thanks for a great year. Here is an end-of-the-year update about our long-term snow leopard study in the South Gobi, Mongolia. November marked one of the coldest months in South Gobi with mercury dipping to abysmal limits. Field work became increasingly difficult and our camp remained under thick cover of snow. Despite …
Weekly Cat Update: Saikhan in the badlands
Saikhan continues his exploratory movements. This time he ventured several kilometers into a “badlands” area of low-lying sandstone-like formations in the Toson-Bumba mountain range, and area that we would consider to be ‘unsuitable’ snow leopard habitat. Itgel continues to make small, but consistent movements in the vicinity of the site where we collared him. Unfortunately …
New Challenges For Snow Leopards Arise in Mongolia
Twice this year, and possibly a third time, snow leopards have been captured or injured in steel-jaw leg-hold traps intended to capture wolves. The most recent incident occurred on July 5th when a herder arrived at the Snow Leopard Trust’s research camp to report a snow leopard caught in a wolf trap near his ger …
Just how much scat do we need?
A lot. In fact, we’re hoping to collect 200 snow leopard scat samples over summer. Kim, our Assistant Director of Science, is in Mongolia now collecting scat, and supervising numerous other projects. Kims says they swapped out Azati’s collar, and that his old one is pretty beat up. “The rest of our field work is …
Summer Crew
Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who bought a one-way ticket to Mongolia to work at the base camp of our long-term research project. These are his adventures… The summer crew arrived in Base Camp on the evening of the 15th of June and since then, things have been busy here. The crew consists of Kim …
Field Camera Footage of a Wild Snow Leopard
Here is a video of Saikhan, a wild male snow leopard we are studying in Mongolia. Assistant Director of Science Kim Murray made this video by piecing together still frames, taken every half second, from a remote field camera.
Alone in the Gobi
Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who bought a one-way ticket to Mongolia to work at the base camp of our long-term research project. These are his adventures… We were all very happy that we had caught a female. Too bad this joy turned into misery after just two days when we didn’t get any fixes …
The Sixth Snow Leopard
Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who bought a one-way ticket to Mongolia to work at the base camp of our long-term research project. These are his adventures… Yeeeeeaaaaahhhiiii!! A female. We have a female. And it is a very pretty female too. We fitted her with a collar very close to Camp, and since it …
GPS Study Goals Met
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 …