After being
tranquilized, an adult female snow leopard named Tenger is fitted with a
GPS tracking collar. World Wildlife Fund researchers in Mongolia hope
the information they get from Tenger and other collared snow leopards
will lead to protected areas for the rare and increasingly threatened
cats.Photograph by Hereward Holland
Just as the last of the blushing light
drained from the sky in western Mongolia, the “ghost of the mountain”
struck at the foot of sacred Jargalan mountain where the rocky snow line
gives way to a dry and treeless expanse of steppe.
“I saw my animals were very afraid, they were running from something,” said Myagmarjan Maamkhuu in his yurt-like tent, or ger, the day after the incident. “When I got closer, I saw the snow leopard with one of my sheep.”
It was Tenger, a mature female well known to Maakkhuu. “Of course we
were angry at first, but we’ve got used to it,” he said, offering me
milky tea served in a bowl as his wife and three young sons sat by our
side. “We don’t go looking for revenge.”
Maamkhuu tends more than a thousand livestock—sheep and goats mainly
and a few horses—and this sheep, he said, with a zen-like lack of angst,
was the third one he’d lost that week to snow leopards. In a bad year,
the elusive spotted cats take up to 30 of his animals.
A shepherd
herds his flock of sheep and goats in the foothills of Jargalan
mountain. More than a third of Mongolia’s 2.6 million people are nomadic
or seminomadic, but their pasturelands are disappearing. Photograph by Hereward Holland
A local folk song celebrates Maamkhuu’s home, the Altai Sayan mountains of western Mongolia:
Snow melts, springs flow,
And fresh green grasses grow,
Cuckoos sing,
Indeed, mysterious, old, beautiful Altai Sayan.
But the bucolic haven of that ode is fast becoming a fantasy. More
than a third of Mongolia’s 2.6 million people are, like Maamkhuu,
nomadic or seminomadic herders, and their pasturelands are disappearing.
Sandwiched between China and Russia, Mongolia is the world’s second
largest landlocked country. It’s among the countries most affected by
global warming—the focus of the world’s nations in Paris this week—because of its geographic location, fragile ecosystems, and pastoral way of life.
During the past 30 years, the region’s average annual temperature has risen by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.1 degrees Celsius).
The result: a desertifying landscape with degraded lower-altitude
pastures that have traditionally nourished herders’ sheep and goats.
It’s so bad that around a quarter of the country has turned into desert,
while some 850 lakes and 2,000 rivers have completely dried out over
the past 30 years, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
Herders like
Myagmarjan Maamkhuu are now grazing their flocks at higher elevations
where pastures are richer. But snow leopards are preying on their
animals, and some herders are retaliating against the cats. Photograph by Hereward Holland
So Maamkhuu and other herders are taking their animals to better
pastures at higher elevations. On those mountainsides, their sheep and
goats are eating grasses that sustain wild argali (blue) sheep and
ibexes, themselves the main food supply of snow leopards.
Inevitably, the big cats are now preying on the domesticated animals.
To protect their livelihoods, herders are hunting snow leopards, whose
numbers are now as low as 4,000, with perhaps a quarter of them in the
Altai Sayan mountains.
The cats are a barometer of environmental conditions in a swath of
territory that spans 12 countries and holds the headwaters of 20 major
river basins inhabited by more than two billion people. Rapid warming in
this region is disrupting people as well as wildlife.
If climate change isn’t slowed, more than a third of snow leopard
territory might become unsuitable for the cats, according to the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF), which has been helping to conserve them for many years.
The cats are a barometer of conditions in a territory that spans 12 countries inhabited by more than two billion people.
To date, WWF says, only 14 percent of snow leopard habitat has been
studied with a view to putting conservation measures in place.
Ultimately, the goal is to gather enough information to demarcate zones
of protection that would be off-limits to herders and their animals.
To Track a Sheep Thief
Last month, I joined a team of WWF researchers led by Ochirjav
Munkhtogyokh on a two-week expedition aimed at trapping snow leopards,
attaching GPS collars around their necks, and releasing them. During the
past three years, Munkhtogyokh's team has placed remote cameras all
over Jargalan mountain, and they’ve recorded the presence of 37 snow
leopards, including ten cubs.
I arrived after the first week. By then, a dozen cable traps had been
laid to catch cats. The traps, designed to prevent pain or injury,
consisted of a thick cable tied in a slip knot and placed on a
spring-loaded pressure pad.
Hours after Tenger had attacked Maamkhuu’s sheep, the team had placed
four cable snares around the half-eaten carcass, which was wedged on a
hillside against the bank of a dry riverbed. They’d positioned a remote
video camera trap nearby to document the snow leopard should she return
for another meal.
Snagging Tenger would be a bonanza because she’d been geotagged
before, in 2013. That first GPS device had stopped sending data after
nine months, and ever since Tenger has roamed the rocky escarpments with
a mountain of data locked up in her collar—information about her daily
habits and movements and the extent of her home range that would inform
efforts to map out a protected area for snow leopards.
The World
Wildlife Fund team set a trap next to one of Maamkhuu’s sheep that
Tenger had killed. They hoped she’d come back for another meal and get
snagged so they could put a new GPS collar on her. And that’s what
happened.Photograph by Hereward Holland
Nine days into the expedition, the team hadn’t seen hide nor hair of
Tenger—or any other snow leopard. But the next morning when we went to
check on the sheep carcass, most of the remains were gone. Sure enough,
as the video footage from the camera trap showed, Tenger had returned to
eat the rest of the sheep. Yet she’d eluded the cable snares.
Back at base camp, Munkhtogyokh opened his laptop. He wanted to show
me how herders are avenging attacks on their livestock. In one frame, a
snow leopard limps along with a metal hunting trap locked around its
front paw. It pauses, sniffs the ground, and staggers out of camera
range.
According to Munkhtogyokh, 5 of the 37 snow leopards they’d recorded
had either lost a front paw or been caught in snares set along snow
leopard trails.
Ochirjav
Munkhtogyokh and his team from WWF scour the mountainside for signs of a
snow leopard, as well as their prey base, argali sheep and ibex. Photograph by Hereward Holland
He said he’d seen two cubs with their mother, whose front paw was
caught in one. She was struggling to keep up with her young, he said.
“Snow leopards catch animals with the two front legs. When one paw is
cut, it’s a tragedy. How is she going to feed herself and her cubs?”
More Sheep Kills
By the penultimate afternoon of the expedition a snow leopard had picked off three more sheep from Maamkhuu’s flock.
“We could go to the place where there are no snow leopards and stay
there during the winter, like the mountain to the east, but on that
mountain there is no grass, Maamkhuu said. “It’s bad for livestock—it
would be hard to deliver our lambs.”.
In a bad year, the elusive spotted cats take up to 30 of his animals.
Maamkhuu waved me over to his telescope, through which I could make
out a bloody carcass lying in a gully of grey rock and patchy scrub far
down the valley. A few feet away, a long fluffy tail was sticking out
from behind a bush, slowly twitching. It was Tenger, guarding the dead
sheep and waiting for nightfall when she’d eat.
Twilight bled to dusk, and the WWF researchers arrived. Tenger
retreated up the hill, and the team set about laying more cable traps.
The following morning we returned to the carcass. Crouching next to
her kill was Tenger, a cable-snare looped around her front right paw.
The team quickly tranquilized her and, after a gentle prod with a stick
to make sure she was asleep, took vital measurements, such as her
weight, and swapped the old tracking collar for a new one.
Maamkhuu’s
wife, standing on the ridgeline at right, surveys the family’s flock of
sheep and goats near their home on Jargalan mountain. A warming climate
in Mongolia threatens both their way of live and the survival of snow
leopards.Photograph by Hereward Holland
“I’m very pleased that we caught the same snow leopard,” Munkhtogyokh
said, kneeling over the motionless Tenger. “It’s much better than
catching a different one.” That’s because the cache of information
stored in her original collar and the promise of all the fresh data
they’ll get from the new one will go a long way toward helping them map
out a protected snow leopard area.
The mission is urgent. A further 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees
Celsius) of warming is predicted in Mongolia by the end of the century,
according to Tuya Tserenbataa, a climate change expert with the
Mongolian government.
“There’s an old proverb,” Tserenbataa said. If you talk about bad
things, then they will happen. But if we don’t do anything now, life
will become very difficult.”
If the predicted warming comes to pass, life will become even harder
for Maamkhuu and other herders in Mongolia—and no less hard for the
dwindling numbers of snow leopards.
The information from Tenger, Munkhtogyokh said, is “very significant both scientifically and practically. Very significant.”
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