Tag: wildlife conservation projects

The training and induction days of the final slot went off without a hitch except to say that, due to a problem with the partner organisation’s cars we got to base camp a car short. It was expected to arrive the next day, driven by NABU’s Aman, after being repaired. When it did not arrive we waited, thinking that the serious nature of the problem might have resulted in a delay in Bishkek. When, by the afternoon of the next day Aman still hadn’t arrived, we set out to find a phone signal about an hour down the road towards Koshkor. We discovered that the car had left Bishkek the previous day. We discovered also that he had reached his birth village at the foot of the range that day. At this point I became concerned that he may have run into trouble, so we went on into the village to ask around.

The concensus in the village was that he had left that morning, but he had not made it to the base camp. All this took quite a while and it was dark by the time we all agreed that we would need to search. A slow and poorly lit drive back yielded no results despite numerous stops to peer into the deep gorges in the moonlight.

The next morning I told the team of the situation and the need to mount a potentially grizzly search for our colleague who had dissapeared without a trace. To their immense credit, everyone on the team stepped forward to participate in what could easily have turned into a very unpleasant task. A basic plan was formed and with the ready collaboration of the entire team we honed the search on the fly with one car canvasing locals while the other two slowly cruised the valley stopping to scan the deep floor at the bottom of the precipitous valley walls. Wherever a view of the bottom of the slope was not possible from the car, the car would stop and the searchers would fan out to investigate the valley floor. The other car would pass them and do the same at the next occluded view point. In this way they leap-frogged each other to the end of the valley. At the bottom of the range, as we gathered and I prepared to push further on into the flats below and raise an official search, a car appeared and we quickly realised that it was Aman. His breakes had begun to fail after leaving the village, as had his mobile phone, fully in line with Murphy’s law. For safety sake, he had headed back to fix this second car issue but no-one was the wiser. Needless to say he was surprised by the overly happy welcoming party that had come down the mountain to meet him. A very good ending, all things considered.

The best laid plans… The teams returned late yesterday with stories of awesome landscapes, uncrossable glacial torrents, bits of horse left rotting and some interesting interactions with curious wildlife…but no snow leopard.

The team that went to the original base camp valley had hoped to make camp in the general vicinity of the attack on the horse. When Rhys looked around his possition, he actually found a leg and then another a bit further away a third was found.

They had the spot and spent two days surveying out from there into any likely habitat they could reach. Unfortunately to no avail as far as the leopard was concerned. They were compensated, however, by the occurance of another major herders’ games event. During the last slot we were informed of an “annual” Herders’ Olympics downvalley from us. Well it seems that “annual” means fortnightly in these parts and so the team were met with huge crowds and even a media presence from Bishkek there to cover the games.

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The other team returned to the valley in which I had heard a the coughing sound and conducted a couple of days of hard survey, but again did not find any evidence of our animal. They did remark on the beuty of the place though and were accompanied by Talant our very helpful neighbour and some of his horses to carry gear and due to his seniority within that particular group, Meinhard got a horse to ride along with Talant and Kurmanbek (spelled correctly this time), one of our NABU participants.

We have decided to strike while the iron is hot. As you know, as a result of our recent interviews with local herders, we have discovered two very recent incidents involving alleged leopard attacks on young horses in two of the bigger and more remote valleys in this system. Each were within the fortnight or so and in response to the more local account, we investigated on horseback the site of an atttack. As we placed a camera beside a heavily used pass, the unmistakeable cough of what we surmised to be a big cat in the cliffs above could be heard. Whilst none of the party saw the animal, we are now fairly certain that there is a snow leopard in that location.

The more distant and more recent incident is in fact in the valley of the original base camp. The stories are very similar, with a young horse discovered dead with large puncture and crush wounds to the throat. This is highly typical of the leopard method of killing large prey, gripping the throat and asphixiating the quarry (there is a photo sequence of this killing method on http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/20/the-first-ever-successful-snow-leopard-hunt-and-kill-caught-on-camera/). The fact that a snow leopard will apparently abandon the kill at the slightest disturbance has led to the almost ubiquitously believed folk tale that the snow leopard is in fact drinking the blood of its prey rather than eating its flesh. Either way, large dead animals with “vampire-like” neck wounds can only mean one thing and the consistency of the stories as told by the herders who recently lost their horses, and by the wider community of herders throughout our huge survey region who’ve simply heard about those losses, suggests that we are not being led on a wild goose chase by folk who just want to tell us what we want to hear.

So, the hot iron… We have decided to split the team into two overnighters who will each attend an incident site and attempt to make a more thorough investigation of the environs surrounding the two kills. One team has returned to the valley of the original base camp and will atempt to get to the bottom of that story before heading further into the valley with Volodya. The other team has been deployed back into the valley that was the subject of my recent experience and will spend two days making a careful survey of its upper reaches. We have sent the FLIR thermographic equipment with the second team as they will be camping closer to the cliffs and will have a better chance to use the gear to best effect. The first team have a powerful spotting scope to scan the wider valley ends that they will face.

Your truly has remained at base camp with our awesome chef, Emma, as it represents a “central” point of contact that either group will be able to find me at should the need arise, rather than trying to locate me in either of the large ranges that each group will be negotiating.

For some reason I feel like this will be an exciting next couple of days… For the team at least. At least I’ll eat well…

Our neighbours from a yurt down the road reported that one of their young horses was killed by a leopard about two weeks ago. He offered to take us to the site of the attack on horseback to set up some camera traps. Today we took him up on his offer and what ensued was a hard ride up a long valley in sometimes driving snow and other times baking sun. When we got to the end of the valley, we ascended on foot beyond the moraine to a vegetated pass in a protected hollow below a small glacier. Signs of leopard prey were common and fresh with footprints and scat everywhere. While we were setting up the third camera, a small disturbance high above us sent some stones tumbling and a second or so later a percussive cough, characteristic of a leopard was clearly heard. The local guys believe that a mother and cubs are resident in this place from where they make hunting forays into the valley propper. I can’t wait to pick up those cameras with the last slot….