Snow Leopard Blog

With our recent success in collaring another male snow leopard, we wanted to reintroduce you to the snow leopards who’ve made an appearance near our base camp in South Gobi, Mongolia. For more information (including photos) of these cats, visit our Meet the Cats page.

Snow Leopards We Are Tracking

Aztai (Lucky)– a male, probably 4-5 years old. He was collared in August 2008 about 250 meters from Base Camp. He weighed 36.5 kg at that time. In June 2009, we changed his collar, and he weighed 42 kg. In February 2010, Aztai weighed 44.5 kg. Aztai stays quite calm during collaring, keeping his cool. Last summer, Orjan managed to get within 15 meters from him undetected when he (Aztai) was lying down, licking his paws. When Orjan approaches him, he usually lays still and settles for shooting meaningful glares at Orjan, as if he is giving “the evil eye.” Aztai lives in the area surrounding Base Camp. He used to squeeze out a territory in between Bayartai and Tsagaan, but when Bayartai died, Aztai took over his area.

Bayartai (Go with joy) (aka Longtail) was a big male, weighing about 45 kg. He was collared in September 2008 and killed by a herder while raiding livestock in December 2008.

Tsagaan (White) is another big male, weighing about 43 kg. He was collared in February 2009. Since then we have performed two check-ups on him. One can always tell if it is Tsagaan nearby, because he growls at you when you are about 50 meters away. He displays his feelings in a very clear way. Tsagaan’s collars have transmitted intermittently; we don’t know too much about him now, but we’ll learn more when we collect his collar and download it manually. His home range borders Aztai’s, and it seems as if they patrol the border intensively.

Shonkhor (Falcon) was collared in April 2009, weighing 34 kg. We think that he was almost two years old at that time and had recently separated from his mother. He is a cautious fellow. He has made several short expeditions out from Toson Bumba, the small mountain range that he inhabits but never stays away for more than two days before he returns. When he is photographed, he rapidly moves away–unlike many of the other cats that often don’t care about the camera or even show curiosity. In June 2009 Shonkhor killed a big Argali male.

Saikhan (Beautiful) was collared in May 2009, weighing 33 kg. He was collared in the same area as Shonkhor and the two has traveled together for short periods. We think that the two of them might be brothers. Saikhan left the Toson Bumba Mountains shortly after he was collared and has moved all over the mountains since. For a while he hung out in Aztai’s area, and this seems to have offended Aztai who followed Saikhan around.

Suhder (Shadow) was collared in May 2009 in the same area as Shonkhor and Saikhan. She is our first female and weighed 30 kg. It is possible that she is a sister to Shonkhor and Saikhan. Unfortunately we could not fit the collar to her smaller neck and she was able to slip out of it within two days.

Itgel (Hope) was caught and wounded in a leghold trap set for wolves by some local herders. A herder came to camp to tell us about what had happened. Itgel had managed to get the trap lose from its anchor and was hiding in a cave with the trap attached to his paw. After several attempts we managed to sedate him by crawling into the cave. Itgel was in bad shape. We treated his wounds, gave him antibiotics and put a collar on him to see if he would survive. There was nothing more we could do for him given our remote location. He seemed to recover from his injuries, and after 1.5 months he was moving around almost like the other leopards. In November 2009 his collar came off and was found on a mountainside. His fate is unknown at the moment.

M7 was collared in February 2010. He weighs 39.5 kg and has no scars on his face. All the adult males have lots of scars from fighting, and the lack of scars makes us believe that he is a younger male, probably 2.5 years old, who has not yet found an area of his own.

Snow Leopards We Have Only Photographed

In November 2008, our trap cameras took pictures of a snow leopard with an S-shaped spot on the back. The cat was named Superman. In June 2009, our trap cameras took more pictures of Superman, this time accompanied by “his” one-year old cubs. Her name was rapidly changed to Supermom! Her three cubs are called Knatte, Fnatte and Tjatte (the Swedish names for Donald Duck’s three nephews).

In March 2009, our trap cameras took pictures of a cat that we named Kitty, hoping that it was a female. Upon closer inspection, it’s appears that Kitty is actually a male.

Another female with three cubs was photographed in summer 2009. At the moment her name is “Toson Bumba Mom”.

Apart from these, we have photographed at least four more cats that have not been named yet.

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The cats have been on the prowl over the past two weeks, and appear to have had some successful hunting activity!

Aztai (green) has been feasting – and how! Just a day before he was collared in the last week of February, he had been feeding on three goats. Orjan confirmed this after making a quick visit to the cluster of locations we saw from the satellite uplinks, partly answering the question of Aztai’s ever-growing weight. Not one to wait for long, though, Aztai was on a cluster again from the 4th of March until the morning of the 7th, the time of our last uplink from his collar, at which time he appeared to have paused–he has likely found food again. Since his location is not far from our trap camp, Orjan can make a reconnaissance of the cluster area. We hope to learn more about this possible kill site and what the prey species is.

Shonkhor (red) appears to have been equally busy, with uplinks indicating a potential kill on the 28th of February. A cluster of six locations was uplinked to the satellite, though we didn’t receive anything from his collar between the 1st and 5th. The last two locations on the 6th show him 11 km west of this cluster, and after having had a good meal, he now appears to be on a long patrol towards the far edge of his home-range.

M7, the recently collared male snow leopard, spent about a week in the vicinity of the camp, after which he seems to have left with verve on a possible mission. He headed on a straight trajectory due NE and has covered approximately 27 km in just about 7 days. The last location points now depict M7 in an area that we last knew to be used by Itgel. It will be interesting to follow M7’s movements in the coming week to see if he returns to the region where he was collared, or if he continues this expedition. He appears to be young, and we would not be surprised if we see more of these long distance forays, something we have seen Shonkhor and Saikhan do routinely while establishing their respective territories. Following his movements, along with Shonkhor and Saikhan, will provide us further insight into snow leopard’s range use and dispersal patterns

We have not heard anything from the collars of Saikhan or Tsagaan, and our research team is now trying to intercept their VHF signals with hand-held telemetry units. They are also deploying additional photo-trap cameras in the areas these cats have been known to utilize. This will increase our chances of discovering their movements, and we’ll be able to replace their collars.

Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who works at the base camp of our long-term research project in Mongolia. These are his adventures…

I ended my last blog entry with “Time for the 11 p.m. trap check, perhaps we have caught something now”.

Well, one of the trap transmitters was indeed on fast pulse, so I checked too see if I could pick up the signal from any of our collared cats, and I heard Tsagaan. That was good news, his collars needs to be changed.

We rapidly loaded all the gear in the car. Forty-five minutes later we were near the snow leopard. I looked around the cliff wall and saw spotted fur and a pair of eyes looking at me. Though it was not Tsagaan, which I kind of knew, I hadn’t heard any growling, and my headlamp was not reflected in white, long teeth. Instead it was an un-collared cat. The cat was very calm, which led me to believe that it was a female. Nothing macho about the comment; snow leopard females seem much calmer than males do.

The collaring and release were successful, except that I was wrong – it was another male… I still haven’t figured out how to catch females.

He weighed 39.5 kg and didn’t have any scars in his face, which all our adult males have. I think that he is a young male, probably 2.5 years old. We monitor the animals’ breathing, pulse, and temperature every tenth minute through the collaring process to make sure that they are doing fine. We have never had any problems with a cat, but in case any of the vital signs move to a un-normal level, we have a safe routine, and equipment to handle the situation.

Soon after the collaring, the cat had scaled a ridge and disappeared from our view. At 2:30 AM we returned to camp. Marhaan checked the trap signals, and I cleaned the capture gear so that everything would be good to go.

When I checked the trap signals at 6 a.m. we had another alarm, 300 meters from where we encountered the last cat. I thought that perhaps it was him again, but to my surprise it was Aztai.

He was calm and behaved nicely, as he usually does. This might sound like a contradiction of what I said earlier about the behavioral differences between male and female snow leopards, but with the exception of Aztai and M7 (the new cat), all the males are much more aggressive. We didn’t have to measure Aztai or change his collar, so after weighing him we put him in the sleeping bag with a warm water bottle at his chest. It was still windy but not too cold, perhaps 5-8 degrees C below zero. Still, ten minutes after we had put him in the bag, his temperature had raised from 37 to 37.5 degrees C. Quite interesting that despite their extremely thick fur, they still benefit so much from the sleeping bag and water bottle. Perhaps that is why they like my sleeping bag so much that sometimes they seem reluctant to leave it.

It was a big night with lots of work, and it took a while for me to recover from it. Two snow leopard encounters in one night was not something I thought possible. It’s always good to be prepared and keep the gear in order…

Our GPS tracking equipment showed that Tsagaan was in the same area at the same time, and I wonder what these three males were doing in the same area. The only explanation that I can find is that there was a female somewhere around. My guess is that she was pretty good looking.

All of us have been waiting in quiet anticipation to hear news from Orjan, not knowing when another snow leopard would be captured, collared and released. Perhaps you too have joined us in the silent hope that it would be a female—after all, we already have numerous males that we are tracking, but a female has yet to be tracked successfully in the Tost Mountains. Although we can’t share that news with you (yet), we are excited to announce that we collared another male on the 25th of February 2010. The snow leopard was captured, collared and released safely, and it has left us all intrigued about the number of males that are thriving in this landscape, overlapping their movement patterns within the 3500 km2 study site. Temporarily named M7 (light blue on the map), this male is a large cat and the 8th to join our GPS radio collar study. He weighs 39.5 kg, though lacks any scars on his face, giving an indication that he is a big, yet possibly young snow leopard. These scars usually testify to the battles that a cat may have fought over the years in order to carve or maintain a territory against existing territorial individuals. In the initial three days, M7 has seemed to utilize the eastern portion of what we refer to as Aztai’s home range.

Interestingly enough, this same night, on the 25th of February, Aztai (red) was caught again just 300-400 meters from where M7 was caught. Since his collar is still new, it was checked for any wear-and-tear and given that it was in good shape, the collar was kept on him. Aztai was released after Orjan took measurements, assessed his overall well-being and weighed him. He scored the highest of the three occasions that we have been able to weigh him: 36.5kg in August 2008, 42kg in June 2009, and 45kg on this February capture. Perhaps the biggest cat to be captured in the wild for research! That said, a loose cluster of GPS locations recorded up until the previous morning of 24th could possibly justify his increased weight. He seems to have been on a kill, and thus may be very heavy from feeding! Since the cluster is not very far from our base camp, and is accessible, we hope that Orjan will soon be able to visit the site to ground truth the location and answer questions about if it was a kill, and if so, what he was feeding on.

Based on the nearly 200 locations we have from Shonkhor, he seems to have settled himself into his home range which extends the length of the region between the Toson Bumba and Tost Mountains. He does continue to make periodic (and somewhat trademark) excursions from Toson Bumba to the Tost region, just about touching Aztai’s home range and then heading back into what appears to be the center of his home range.

We look forward to seeing how active Orjan’s next few weeks turn out to be as we enter into March!

Usually, we think of establishing protected areas as being a top-down phenomenon. But in snow leopard areas of northern India, the Snow Leopard Trust and its in-country partner, the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), are pursuing a different model. There, we are working with four communities to build protected areas from the grass roots up—literally. The communities have established grazing-free reserves, which protect select areas of pastureland to enable the recovery and restoration of the habitat, wild prey, and snow leopard populations.

The process begins, of course, with conscientious efforts to build rapport through ongoing research and conservation work, community meetings, and discussions with village leaders. In this area of the Himalayas, each community has traditional pastures for grazing their livestock. So, to establish a grazing-free reserve, the community signs a contract with us in which they agree to set aside some of their pasture area for a certain period of time, usually three to five years (after which time the contract may be renewed). The community appoints guards to monitor the reserve and makes sure no resource use takes place inside its boundaries. To compensate for the loss of the pasture area, the Trust and NCF provide financial assistance that can be used for development work by the village councils that govern each community.

Currently there are four villages participating—Kibber, Chichim, Hanle, and Losar—and roughly 50 square kilometers of pasture protected. The oldest grazing-free reserve, near the village of Kibber, was established in 1998, and has been an enormous ecological success. The reserve is now home to the region’s highest density of bharal, or blue sheep—a major snow leopard prey species. In the most recent census, in November 2009, we counted 405 bharal there! And at least four snow leopards have been spotted in the reserve by our infrared trap-cameras.

As the population of bharal in the Kibber reserve has increased, it has deflected some of the snow leopard predation pressure on a nearby population of ibex that uses the Chichim grazing-free reserve, which was established in 2005. For many years this ibex population remained around 20-25 individuals, but in the past few years, we have been counting close to 50 individuals. We also have evidence that the animals are now using the reserve year-round (instead of migrating to higher pastures during the summer)—another positive sign.

A third grazing-free reserve, near the village of Hanle, was established specifically to protect the endangered Tibetan gazelle. Last year, one of our staff observed seven gazelle fawns in and around the reserve, so we’re hopeful that the population will show further signs of recovery in the years ahead.

The newest reserve, near Losar, was just formed last year and is believed to harbor snow leopards, around 50 Himalayan ibex, red fox, Tibetan wolf, and possibly wild dog (dhole).

Our observations, while limited, also show that the plant diversity is higher inside the reserves, suggesting that the protection benefits all parts of the ecosystem. And because the pastures are normally not used particularly intensively—the communities usually follow a grazing rotation—taking some of the pastureland out of use has not resulted in degradation of the remaining grazing lands.

Of course, the grazing-free reserve program is only one aspect of what makes our conservation programs in India successful. We are also working with communities to, for example, improve herding practices to prevent losses to wild predators, implement a community-run (and partly community-funded) livestock insurance program to reimburse families for such losses when they do occur, and carry out a conservation education program. We are also hoping to diversify our programs even more in the future, exploring avenues to launch an ecotourism program in the Kibber area.

We are extremely excited to report an uplink from Tsagaan (white). This single data point lets us know that he is not far from where our researchers are operating right now.

Aztai (green) and Shonkhor (red) covered an average of at least 7 km and 6 km per day respectively. Since we do not know the movement pattern between two locations, these GPS maps are only indicative of the minimum distance that the snow leopards may have covered in the specific time. Aztai’s locations show an interesting ‘zigzag’ pattern of movement towards the Eastern and Western edges of his home range. He seems to have visited the areas of his home range that overlap with that of Tsagaan at least three times. At 0100 hours, the morning of the 17th of February, Tsagaan was at the very edge of his home range in an area that overlaps with that of Aztai. At 0700 hours that same morning, Aztai was shown making a 5 km deep ‘invasion’ into Tsagaan’s territory! Fascinating. We have no uplinks from Tsagaan after the 17th, and Aztai’s next location uplink was only on the 19th. What happened in between is unknown as of now, but we hope to learn more as we replace the collars and retrieve the complete location dataset from the current collar. It astounds us to imagine what interesting tales will unfold.

As is evident from the three new locations that uplinked from his collar, Shonkhor was also on the move. He appears to have traveled close to the southeastern-most border of his home range, not far from the area where Aztai’s home range meets his. The next step can be determined from the uplinks: he traveled back into the center of his own territory. So many questions come to mind: Was Aztai making such broad ‘zigzag movements’ in an attempt to defend his territory from these two other males? Is there a female in oestrus nearby that might be influencing these males and their movements? As planned for the upcoming field season, Orjan is in pursuit of any nearby female snow leopards that we might collar in order to improve our understanding of these interactions between snow leopards, which is currently a mystery to the scientific community.

For more information on how collaring works, please visit our FAQ page.

Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who works at the base camp of our long-term research project in Mongolia. These are his adventures…

It’s been two hectic weeks in camp. Bayara (Country Program Director for Mongolia), Pursee (Mongolian biologist), and Charu (Science & Conservation Director) arrived a little more than a week ago. To our aid, the last week has been much warmer, a lot of the snow has disappeared, and it’s been easier to navigate the terrain. Bayara is really the person who makes everyday life out here so smooth, and she takes an excellent care of me. Sometimes I think that she takes too good care of me and spoils me a little. But without the staff’s advice, planning, help with logistics, and all of you who donate or take interest in the study, I would make quite a sorry sight out here, and we would probably not have any cats collared yet. Charu said that we must be among the luckiest people on earth to have the jobs we have. I can only agree. To spend one day in the sunshine, up in the mountains, studying wildlife–it’s an experience that can’t be described. It’s also challenging to study a cat in this terrain I can tell you…

Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who works at the base camp of our long-term research project in Mongolia.  These are his adventures…

We arrived in the Gobi about a week ago. All the equipment and gers (large Mongolian tents) have been stored in a tiny house since last summer, and the first thing we did was to locate all the things we needed. In two days time, we had leveled the ground for the floor, built, furnished and cleaned the ger. I’ll admit that I didn’t help much; I felt as if I was mostly in the way. I sorted all the equipment and connected the cables for solar power and all electronics instead. It’s quite amazing how fast Mongolians can set up a ger (once the floor is leveled it only takes three-four hours), and that in two days time we can go from “nothing” to a fully functional research camp.

There is a lot of snow in Mongolia this winter. I’ve heard that millions of livestock are dying, on the way to camp we saw piles of dead animals. There are almost no herders in the mountains around camp and the canyons that I want to find snow leopards in are filled with 10-30 cm of snow.

And if snow leopards knew what their species’ name means and could vote, I think they would ask us to change it. They don’t seem to like snow…

Tom told me this long ago, I thought it was because their fur is yellowish-grayish and that they are too obvious in snow. But during the last days when I have hiked around I have found fresh tracks from snow leopards four times (I think it is the same individual that has spent some time close to my camp). I have tracked the leopard and it is very interesting to see how much care it takes not to put its paws in deep snow. It didn’t walk in the canyons, rather it stayed on the mountainsides and whenever it had to cross an area of deep snow, it made sure to find a passage with rocks to walk on.

Today is Tsagaan Sar (Buddhist new year). We had planned to visit with two families, but it is so cold that our Russian van refused to start. Marhaan, my assistant, has tried to thaw out the engine with a blow torch (!) without any luck so far.

Given the erratic uplinks from Shonkhor’s collar (red), we had a rare moment this week with the recording of a cluster, possibly depicting a kill site or resting spot! On the 8th and 9th of February, we received a cluster of three locations within 50 meters of each other. Unfortunately there were no uplinks following that until the 15th when he had moved, and therefore we are unable to identify how long Shonkhor remained at the site and why. The good news is that Orjan is in the field now and the camp is set up and ready. As told by the herders, the winter this year has been remarkably cold. Most areas are covered under a thick layer of snow, and this makes our field work a bit more challenging for now. Even a visit to investigate the cluster points from Shonkhor’s collar will depend on snow, potentially limiting access. Aztai (green) patrolled his home range, with several uplinks showcasing his movement. He spent a fair amount of time within 5 km from base camp and was on the move, apparently not on any large kill this week.