Pakistan Wildlife Conservation News

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6159767.stm

Snow Leopard Diary (Update)
17 JANUARY: A DRAMATIC RECAPTURE

I am writing this entry from the comforts of my office in the US.

Wildlife biologist Eric York is currently leading our efforts in the snow-covered Chitral Gol, but telecoms glitches - satellite phones never work like they should - mean that I am relaying his most recent endeavours during what has been an action packed few days.

Follow up:

We recently discovered the collar we had placed on the female snow leopard Bayad-e-Kohsaar in November was collecting and storing her GPS data but was failing to successfully relay this crucial information back to us via satellite.

Not wanting to lose this key opportunity to track the movements of this cat, we took the decision to attempt to recapture her and fit her with a new collar.

A spot of luck

By a stroke of good fortune, Bayed had returned to the Chitral Gol National Park.

Her re-emergence was signalled as she came back into radio receiver range, and Eric could track her movements as she roamed near the Kasavir mountains.

With the team, he set about putting more snares out on the high ridges of this area, in the hope Bayad might pass through.

And it worked. A few days later, Eric had trapped her high on the ridge, very close to spot where we had snared, and then lost, a large male snow leopard back in November.

However, the drama was not yet over for the team.

The anaesthetic was not working as quickly as it usually does, and Eric was reluctant to give her more, so opted instead to carefully change the collar while she was still partially awake and mobile. The collar exchange went well with both researcher and cat coming away without a scratch.

Once it was attached and Bayad had spent four hours in a recovery cage coming to, the snow leopard set off, running up the steep ridge.

Her signal now indicates she may be heading back to the Tooshi Game Reserve where we had picked up her signal just before the New Year. We will be following her movements closely over the coming months.

Coming to an end?

Meanwhile, we now have her used-collar to hand, along with the 150 locations that have been stored upon it.

We will be bringing the collar back to the US to start the process of recovering all of that data and mapping her movements of the past 50 days.

Its memory chip now contains more information on snow leopard movements and habitat use than we would have gained from two years of tracking her using ground-based methods.

These cats are just too hard to follow through that extremely rugged habitat on foot! The GPS collar did all of the hard work for us.

But what of our aims to capture and tag four more of the cats? I will be heading back to Chitral in a few days to re-assess our next steps.

We will be watching carefully this week to see if any males come into the area looking for a female, since it is now the breeding season. If Bayad has a hopeful suitor - perhaps the escape artist male we encountered before - we could be in luck.

But if this fails, we may have to bring the trapping to a halt, at least until the summer - there has just been too much snow and too little sign of the cats. Snow leopards never make it too easy for us.

Dr Tom McCarthy, project leader and conservation director of the Snow Leopard Trust.